Christian minorities fear Arab Spring may threaten their existence 11 Oct 2011  The rapid transformation in the Arab region – the result of popular rejection of authoritarian regimes – has raised fears among Christian …http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/504107

ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN – ITS QUDS AND HEZBOLLAH ARM – ATTACKS ON COUNTRIES, POPULATION

1979, Iran’s Islamic revolutionary guards hijack Americans at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.[1][2]

Attacking US Marine Barracks in Oct. 1983, killing 241 Americans and 58 French soldiers.[3][1][4] Marking a milestone in global terror – massacres tactics, with Hezbollah’s introduction of the ‘massive bombing’ by suicide, by the ‘truck bomb.’[5] Under the “spiritual” guidance of Sheik Fadlallah.’[6][7][8]

The 1983 attacks on US and French embassies in Kuwait. Six people (including the bomber) killed, more than 80 injured.[1][9][10] This time, the Iran backed terror group using an alias name “the call.”[11]

Hijacking of TWA flight in 1985 en route to Rome from Athens.[34][35] Robert Dean Stethem was brutally beaten by the Hezbollah before being executed.[36]

Attacking Israel via Hezbollah and Hamas[37][38] terror “freedom fighting” Jihadi organizations.[39][40][26] More noticeably – Iranian equipped[41] and technoligally supported[42] – missile attacks by the Hezbollah on residents beginning in mid 1993,[43] continuing after the IDF pulled out of Lebanon[44] and in the war of 2006. Hamas’ massacres targeting Israeli civilans have caused great havoc, heavy casualties, especially during the height of the “intifadas,” it rose since 2000.[45] The two terror groups cooperate, [46] at times even join in attack.[47]

Downing of a French airline in October 1989 (Palestinian-Hezbollah linked operation).[48]

Unsuccessful attempt to carry out attacks in Cyprus in 1988; a plot, foiled by Spanish police, to carry out attacks against Jewish targets in Europe in 1989; an unsuccessful attempt to detonate a car bomb outside a Jewish community building in Romania in 1992; and a planned 1996 attack, also foiled by police, on an Israeli institution in Paris.[49]

1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, 19 American servicemen killed, over 500 people injured in the apartment complex. Iran is linked.[57][32]

US court finds Iran and its Hezbollah arm involved in the 9/11 massacre [September 11, 2001, where close to 3,000 people died], that they aided the attackers.[58][59][60][61][62] Hezbollah also initiated/invented the ‘9/11 Conspiracy Theories’ on its ‘s television station al-Manar, six days after 9/11 which brought the ugliness of of: ‘9/11 Conspiracy Theories Take Root in Arab/Muslim World.’[63] True that “Qaeda No 2” said that “Iran propagated 9/11 theory.”[64] Hezbollah offered help for the M. Moore’s film: ‘Farenheit 911.’[65]

Killing of many American and British soldiers in Iraq (its trainers and weapons found, Dating at least since November 24, 2003 as reported then by the New York Times.[66] The Iranian/Hezbollah involvement includes training Iraqis how to kidnap Americans.[67][68] Iran’s Quds have been blamed for planting IED devices.[69]

Killing of many of US, NATO soldiers in Afghanistan (backing Taliban).[70][71][72]

In May 2009, Azerbaijan said Iran-Hezbollah plotted to attack the Israeli embassy in that country.[84][85]

In 2010, Mexico foiled a plot by Hezbollah to establish a new network throughout Latin America, according to Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Seyassah.[86]

In 2011, after Tehran has been seeking to destabilize and annex the island nation for decades. It established a military wing for Hezbollah in Bahrain, and its thugs incited “protests” in that country.[87]

At the 2011 uprising in Syria, Iran, its Hezbollah thugs helped Syrian tyrants to oppress, kill protesters and commit atrocities against its civilians.[88][89]

In May-September, 2011, Iran [its Quds arm] plotted to hire Mexican drug cartel to assasssinate Saudi ambassador with a bombing attack on a restaurant that would kill hundreds.[90][91][92][93][94]

“This is not about territory, and it certainly isn’t about justice or human rights, because Arab societies don’t know the meaning of those words. It’s about Jew-hatred, as mandated by the Qur’an and as preached in the mosques and taught to the children in Arab countries day in and day out, generation after poisoned generation.”

Be sure to watch it all. There is a special note for pro-Palestinian Leftists toward the end. (Video thanks to Cheryl.)

In the 1930s, as the Middle East got caught up in Nazism in a combination of ultra Arabism, ‘Arab racism’ and supremacy mixed with Islamic radicalism, Arab Nazi scouts/parties sprung in the Arab world. Like the Futuwwa in Iraq [who, under the pan-Arab, pan-Islamic leader Mufti’s influence was responsible for the Farhud massacre in 1941]; the ‘Young Egypt’ was born in 1933, “producing” such “gems” as warmonger Nasser; the Husseinis in Arab-Palestine created a Hitler Youth type paramilitary and an Arab Nazi Party.

After more than 70 Years, whereas openly Nazism is -fortunately- shunned just about everywhere, still, in the Arab Islamic Egypt there are ‘Arab springers’ who are “inspired” to be Nazis. Repeating the paradox, in spite of the ironic contradiction to the Aryans contempt for them. It is no secret how Hitler and the Nazis despised Arabs (as well as all Middle Easterners), regarded them as “monkeys,” and would have wiped them out (as assertion come out in recent years), just as “soon” as they were “done“ with the Jews.

Founders of the Egyptian Nazi Party: All We Want is World Supremacy for the Egyptian RaceSeptember 28, 2011 Special Dispatch No.4170 Following are excerpts from a TV talk show featuring members of the Egyptian Nazi Party, which aired on Dream1 TV on September 22, 2011.

“Our Political Goal is to Make the Arab Race, or Arabic Speakers, the Best Race“

TV host Wael El-Ebrashi: “A group of young Egyptians have founded a Nazi political party, even though Nazism is a tyrannical Fascist political ideology, which brought ruin and destruction upon the entire world.” […]

Egyptian Nazi Party member Dr. Mamdouh Mansour: “This is a new party with a new ideology. It operates out in the open. It is not a secret or Freemason society. The party’s ideology offers solutions to the problems afflicting Egypt.” […]

Egyptian Nazi Party member Sayyed Gamal: “We have adopted the positive aspects of the Nazi Party, not the negative. We will not carry out holocausts against the Jews, and we will not fight them. This has to do with the policies of the state, in which we do not interfere.

“Nobody finances us – neither at home nor abroad.”

Head of the Egyptian Nazi Party Muhi Al-Din Gamal: “My vision for the future is that within 10 years, we will have representatives in the parliament, and the president will be one of ours as well. Our political goal is to make the Arab race, or Arabic speakers, the best race. They will be at the top level, and we will help to spread the Arabic language throughout the world.”

Egyptian Nazi Party member Rami Gan: “Several businessmen want to finance us, and we have to choose between them. We do not recognize the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

“We want to build an Egyptian nuclear reactor – a reactor that will be built by Egyptians and will have Egyptian components. All Egyptians will unite around this national project.”

“The One and Only Thing We Have Adopted from Nazism is Racial Supremacy”

TV host Wael El-Ebrashi: “Heil Hitler! We have in the studio with us ‘Amr Fouad, a member of the Nazi Party. Welcome, ‘Amr.

Bosnian Moslems recruited the Nazi SS by Yasser Arafat’s ‘Uncle’The most influential party that emulated the Nazis was “Young Egypt,” which was founded in October 1933. They had storm troopers, torch processions, and …http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/recruited.html

Armies of the young: child soldiers in war and terrorism – Page 106
David M. Rosen – Rutgers University Press, 2005 – 199 pages – Preview
Others argued that the “Land is in need of a youth, healthy in body and soul like the Nazi … paramilitary forces. Palestinian students educated in Germany returned to Palestine determined to found the Arab Nazi Party of Palestine. The Husseinis used the Palestinian Arab Party to established the al-Futuwwa http://books.google.com/books?id=zQYQ0tho6mAC&pg=PA106

Semites and anti-Semites: an inquiry into conflict and prejudice – Page 147
Bernard Lewis – W. W. Norton & Company, 1999 – 295 pages – Preview
A first attempt to found an Arab Nazi movement seems to date from the summer of 1933, when the Jaffa correspondent of the Cairo newspaper al-Ahram applied to the German consul for help. It was not forthcoming… The mood of the 1930s was vividly described by Syrian Saml al- Jundi, an early leader of the Ba’th party, …http://books.google.com/books?id=GteStbiDEjAC&pg=PA147

The Jews of Iraq: 3000 years of history and culture

Nissim Rejwan – Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985 – 274 pages – Page 223
…and the Futuwwa and Youth Brigades (katayib al-shabab) whose members ‘imbibed Nazism from the Palestinians and the Syrians’ and who systematically harassed the Jews during the month of May, when they were made responsible for keeping … One more point about the farhud of the first and second of June is worth mentioning here.

The third Reich & the Palestine question – Page 90
Francis R. Nicosia – Transaction Publishers, 2000 – 319 pages – Preview
Wolff’s strong opposition to any sort of German encouragement or support for an Arab Nazi party in Palestine was conveyed in a note to the Foreign Office in Berlin in June, 1933, in which he argued: Because the strengthening of thehttp://books.google.com/books?id=8X2G1G_jD-4C&pg=PA90

First things: Issues 154-158
Institute on Religion and Public Life – 2005 – [Page 14]
Several of the Arab political parties founded during the 1930s were modeled after the Nazi party, including the Syrian Popular Party and the Young Egypt Society, which were explicitly anti-Semitic in their ideology and programs.http://books.google.com/books?id=4-gnAAAAYAAJ&q=modeled

The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin Al-Husseini – Page 28
Chuck Morse – iUniverse, 2003 – 186 pages – Preview
Al- Husseini’s own Palestine Arab Party stood for the expulsion of all Jewish settlers and an independent Arab … efforts to assist in the development of what would become distinctly Nazi-Arab style organizations and political parties…http://books.google.com/books?id=HGkthBwbNg8C&pg=PA28

1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli war – Page 89

Benny Morris – Yale University Press, 2008 – 524 pages – Preview
Al-Hawari tried to model the Najjada on the Ha- ganah. By mid-1946 it had, on paper, “8000” members. The Futuwwa was founded at the end of 1935 by Jamal Husseini as the Arab Party’s youth corps; the Nazi Party or the Hitlerjugend …

Benny Morris – Random House Digital, Inc., 1999 – 751 pages – Google eBook – Preview
It set up its own youth corps, al-Futuwwa (the name of an association of Arab knights during the Middle Ages), which resembled Germany’s Hitler Youth and was officially designated the “Nazi Scouts.” At the founding meeting on February …

Gold, Bankiers und Diplomaten: zur Geschichte der Deutschen Orientbank 1906-1946
Wolfgang Schwanitz – Trafo, 2002 – 429 pages – Page 247 – Snippet view
salem, is called by the Germans the chief of the Arab Nazi party and chosen by the enemy as the future representative of the Arabs in the political meaning of the word.

War aims in the second world war: the war aims of the major belligerents, 1939-45 – by Victor Rothwell – History – 2005 – 244 pages (Page 41)However, the Nazis were clear in their minds that the Arabs were racially inferior, and there would, therefore, be no pleasure to be had from helping them in anything except for the extermination of Jews in their region. http://books.google.com/books?id=XfgLbSc94MEC&pg=PA41

Islam, Nazism, and Totalitarianism

During an interview conducted in the late 1930s (published in 1939), Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychiatry, was asked “…had he any views on what was likely to be the next step in religious development?” Jung replied, in reference to the Nazi fervor that had gripped Germany

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Muhammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.

Albert Speer, who was Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, wrote a contrite memoir of his World War II experiences while serving a 20-year prison sentence imposed by the Nuremberg tribunal. Speer’s narrative includes this discussion, which captures Hitler’s racist views of Arabs on the one hand, and his effusive praise for Islam on the other:

Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eighth century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. For theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament. Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire. Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking, “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” http://www.andrewbostom.org/content/view/61/55/

The roots of Arab Anti-Semitism – By David Greenberg – Slate Magazine Oct 31, 2001 … Then came the Holocaust, which not only marked the pinnacle of European anti-Semitism but encouraged it in the Arab world as well. Because Arab leaders shared the Germans’ hostility to Britain and France—the dominant colonial powers in the Middle East—they were eager to make common cause with Hitler, despite Nazi belief that they, like the Jews, were inferior to Aryans. The mufti of Jerusalem, among others, actively spread propaganda about “Anglo-Saxon Jewish greed” while praising the Nazi war effort. Even years later, sympathy for Nazism could be easily found in Arab culture. When Israel apprehended Adolf Eichmann in 1960, a Saudi newspaper headline read, “Capture of Eichmann, Who Had the Honor of Killing Five Million Jews.”

If the Holocaust nurtured Arab anti-Semitism, it also helped to discredit such bigotry in the West. Indeed, it helped mobilize support for a Jewish state internationally. In 1948, Israel was finally granted independence. As if to welcome their new neighbor into the region, the Arab countries promptly invaded. Israel repulsed the attacks, and in the three Arab-Israeli wars that followed (1956, 1967, 1973), the Jewish state managed to survive and.. http://web.archive.org/web/20050909034206/http://www.slate.com/id/2057949/

The third Reich & the Palestine question – Francis R. Nicosia – 2000 – History – 319 pages (Page 85)Most Arabs never realized that the Nazis would consider them racially inferior as well and that Germany had no intention of undermining British authority in …http://books.google.com/books?id=xh4m-OMrhJUC&pg=PA85

The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj … Chuck Morse – 2003 – History – 188 pages (page 53) … as Hitler was known to have described the Arabs as “lacquered half-apes who ought to be whipped,” to a lower race … http://books.google.com/books?id=HGkthBwbNg8C&pg=PA53

The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters …Martin A. Lee – 1999 – Political Science – 560 pages (page 122) Even though he loathed Arabs (he once described them as “lacquered half-apes who ought to be whipped”), Hitler was nonetheless the idol of the paramilitary … http://books.google.com/books?id=SX4B7pNG3W8C&pg=PA122

What did the Nazis really think about Muslims?According to the Nazis’ racist ideology, Arabs are racial Semites and thus subhumans, similar to Jews. In his book, Mein Kampf, Hitler described the struggle for world domination as an ongoing racial, cultural and political battle between Aryans and non-Aryans. He envisaged a “ladder” of racial hierarchy, asserting that German “Aryans” were at the top of the ladder, while Jews and Gypsies were consigned to the bottom of the order. On Hitler’s racial ladder, Arabs and Muslims occupied a servile place, held in much the same contempt as the Jews.Hitler made a personal remark in 1939 in which he referred to the populace of the Middle East as “painted half-apes that ought to feel the whip”.As in other instances, however, the Nazis never allowed their ideological views to get in the way of more urgent political considerations. The Nazis recognized the importance of wooing the Arab and Muslim world to their side and, in their public proclamations, downplayed their real views of Muslims and Arabs. When Mein Kampf was being translated into Arabic in 1938, Hitler himself tactfully proposed to omit from it his “racial ladder” theory. http://www.projetaladin.org/en/40-questions-40-answers/the-nazis-the-holocaust-and-muslims.html

Hitler was celebrated in large parts of the Arab world, and some newspapers even likened him to the Prophet. The Desert Fox was almost as popular as Hitler. “Heil Rommel” was a common greeting in Arab countries.

Many Arabs thought the Germans would free them from the rule of the old colonial powers France and Britain. Hitler had shown how to burst the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles. After Germany defeated France in 1940, chants against the French and British echoed around the streets of Damascus: “No more Monsieur, no more Mister, Allah’s in Heaven and Hitler’s on earth.”

Adolf Hitler assured the exiled Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, at a meeting in Berlin in November 1941 that his goal was the “destruction of Jewry living in Arabia.” The Führer had racist objections to Arabs as well, though. He declined to shake the Mufti’s hand and refused to drink coffee with him.

Hitler nevertheless provided the Mufti, who later sponsored Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, with a budget of 750,000 Reichsmark per month to foment Jihad in Palestine. In an example of ideological flexibility, the SS even recruited Muslim volunteers and declared that the Muslims living in the Balkans belonged to the “racially valuable” peoples of Europe.http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,484510,00.html

Have no doubt Hitler would have wiped out Arabs after JewsSaturday February 24 2007

MAURICE Papon, lowered into his grave along with his precious Legion d’honneur last week, proved what many Arabs have long suspected but generally refuse to acknowledge: that bureaucrats and racists and others who worked for Hitler regarded all Semitic people as their enemies and that – had Hitler’s armies reached the Middle East – they would ultimately have found a “final solution” to the “Arab question,” just as they did for the Jews of Europe.

Papon’s responsibility for the 1942 arrest and deportation of 1,600 Jews in and around Bordeaux – 223 children among them, all shipped off to the Drancy camp and then to Auschwitz – was proved without the proverbial shadow of a doubt at his 1998 trial.

Less clear were the exact number of Algerians murdered by his police force in Paris and hurled into the Seine in 1961. He organised the police repression of the independence demonstration by 40,000 Algerians; in the cities of Algiers and Oran and Blida and other areas of modern-day Algeria where this atrocity festers on among elderly relatives, they say that up to 400 Algerians were massacred by Papon’s flics. Some historians suggest 250. The same was always claimed of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. From Hitler, he obtained a promise that “when we (the Germans) have arrived at the southern Caucasus, then the time of the liberation of the Arabs will have arrived – and you can rely on my word.” All this came back to me last week when I received a remarkable letter from Toulouse in my Beirut mailbag. It was a response to an article I wrote last year about Irene Nemirovsky, whose magnificent, Tolstoyan novel of the Nazi occupation of France was unfinished when Irene was herself sent to Drancy and on to the crematoria of Auschwitz. My article earned a stiff call of complaint from the press attache at the French embassy in London.

The letter, in slightly ungrammatical English, was written by Nemirovsky’s only surviving daughter, Denise Epstein, and I hope she will not mind if I quote from it: “Allow me to present myself: I am the girl of Irene Nemirovsky . . . and I wanted to thank you for having spoken so well about my mother.

This book caused a certain awakening of the consciences undoubtedly but according to what you teach me from the attitude of the French embassy when one evokes the memory of the Jewish children assassinated with the complicity of the authorities of the time, I realise that the memory is really diluted very easily and which that opens the door with other massacres innocent whatever their origin.

IT is thus with emotion and gratitude that I want to send this small message to you.

I am now 77-years-old and I nevertheless live the every day with the weight of this past on the shoulders, softened by happiness to see reviving my parents, and at the same time as them, I hope to make revive all those of which nobody any more speaks. PS: Sorry for my very bad English!”

It would be hard to find more moving words than these, a conscious belief that the dead can be recalled in their own words along with that immensely generous remembrance of other innocents who have died in other massacres.

The United Nations Should Not Recognize an Apartheid, Judenrein, Islamic Palestine :: Hudson New York

by Alan M. Dershowitz

September 21, 2011 at 11:30 am

The United Nations is being asked to grant the Palestinians the status of a "state," for at least some purposes. The question arises what kind of a state will it be? In an effort to attract Western support, the Palestinian Authority claims that it will become another "secular democratic state." Hamas, which won the last parliamentary election, disagrees. It wants Palestine to be a Muslim state governed by Sharia Law.

We know what the Palestinian leadership is saying to the West. Now let's look at what its saying to its own people, who will, after all, be the ultimate decision makers if Palestine is indeed a democracy.

The draft constitution for the new state of Palestine declares that "Islam is the official religion in Palestine." It also states that Sharia Law will be "the major source of legislation." It is ironic that the same Palestinian leadership which supports these concepts for Palestine refuses to acknowledge that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people. Israel, in contrast to the proposed Palestinian state, does not have an official state religion. Although it is a Jewish state, that description is not a religious one but rather a national one. It accords equal rights to Islam, Christianity and all other religions, as well as to atheists and agnostics. Indeed, a very high proportion of Israelis describe themselves as secular.

The new Palestinian state would prohibit any Jews from being citizens, from owning land or from even living in the Muslim state of Palestine. The Ambassador of the PLO to the United States was asked during an interview whether "any Jew who is inside the borders of Palestine will have to leave?" His answer: "Absolutely!" After much criticism, the Ambassador tried to spin his statement, saying that it applied only to Jews "who are amid the occupation." Whatever that means, one thing is clear: large numbers of Jews will not be welcome to remain in Islamic Palestine as equal citizens. In contrast, Israel has more than 1 million Arab citizens, most of whom are Muslims. They are equal under the law, except that they need not serve in the Israeli army.

The new Palestine will have the very "law of return" that it demands that Israel should give up. All Palestinians, no matter where they live and regardless of whether they have ever set foot in Palestine, will be welcome to the new state, while a Jew whose family has lived in Hebron for thousands of years will be excluded.

To summarize, the new Palestinian state will be a genuine apartheid state. It will practice religious and ethnic discrimination, it will have one official religion and it will base its laws on the precepts of one religion. Imagine what the status of gays will be under Sharia law!

Palestinian leadership accuses Israel of having roads that are limited only to Jews. This is entirely false: a small number of roads on the West Bank are restricted to Israelis, but they are equally open to Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians alike. The entire state of Palestine will have a "no Jews allowed" sign on it.

It is noteworthy that the very people who complain most loudly about Israel's law of return and about its character as the nation state of the Jewish people, are silent when it comes to the new Palestinian state. Is it that these people expect more of Jews than they do of Muslims? If so, is that not a form of racism?

What would the borders of a Palestinian state look like if the Palestinians got their way without the need to negotiate with Israel? The Palestinians would get, as a starting point, all of the land previously occupied by Jordan prior to the 1967 War, in which Jordan attacked Israel. This return to the status quo that led to the 6 Day War is inconsistent with the intention of Security Council Resolution 242, which contemplated some territorial changes.

The new boundaries of this Palestinian state would include Judaism's holiest place, the Western Wall. It would also include the access roads to Hebrew University, which Jordan used to close down this great institution of learning founded by the Jews nearly 100 years ago. The new Palestinian state would also incorporate the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, in which Jews have lived for 3000 years, except for those periods of time during which they were expelled by force.

It is contemplated, of course, that Israel would regain these areas as part of a land swap with the Palestinians. But there is no certainty that the Palestinians would agree to a reasonable land swap. Palestinian leaders have already said that they would hold these important and sacred sites hostage to unreasonable demands. For example, the Western Wall covers only a few acres, but the Palestinian leadership has indicated that these acres are among the most valuable in the world, and in order for Israel to regain them, they would have to surrender thousands of acres. The same might be true of the access road to Hebrew University and the Jewish Quarter.

When Jordan controlled these areas, the Jordanian government made them JudenreinJews could not pray at the Western Wall, visit the Jewish Quarter, or have access to Hebrew University. There is no reason to believe that a Palestinian state would treat Jews any differently if they were to maintain control over these areas.

An Apartheid, Islamic, Judenrein Palestine on the 1967 borders is a prescription for disaster. That is why a reasonable Palestinian state must be the outcome of negotiations with Israel, and not the result of a thoughtless vote by the United Nations.

The Palestinians and Israeli leaders are now in New York. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has offered to sit down and negotiate, with no preconditions, a realistic peace based on a two-state solution. President Abbas should accept that offer, which will actually get the Palestinians a viable state rather than a cheap paper victory that will raise expectations but lower the prospects for real peace.http://www.hudson-ny.org/2442/united-nations-palestine

Push for Palestinian state at UN must be rejected: It will hurt Arabs and Jews alike
New York Daily News – Alan Dershowitz – Wednesday, September 21st 2011, 4:00 AM

An apartheid, Islamic, Judenrein Palestine based on the 1967 borders is a prescription for disaster. That is why a reasonable Palestinian state must be the …

Inernational: From Israel to New York – Jews, Christians Protest Hamas Led …‎ Israel News Agency

By Joel Leyden
Israel News Agency

New York — September 20, 2011 …. Thousands of Jewish and Christian protesters are taking to the streets in Jerusalem and in New York to protest a UN vote on the creation of a Hamas led Palestine…

The issue is not a vote at the UN. The issue is that of an all out PR campaign of incitement and violence coordinated by Iran, Syria, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah which will transcend into a regional war in the Middle East.

The Israel Defense Forces are preparing for mass riots as the Israel Defense Forces Home Front Command prepares bomb shelters for it’s citizens.

Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, criticized the Palestinian effort last Friday, calling it a violation of the Oslo Accords, the 1993 agreement between Israel and the PLO.

“The Palestinians made a commitment to Israel and the world, to resolve all outstanding issues through negotiations. The Palestinians are violating their signed commitments.”

Regev also threatened the PA, saying that if they proceed with their UN action either with the General Assembly or the Security Council, “Israel will reserve the right to respond in kind”. Several Israel lawmakers have suggested responding by annulling the accords or by annexing all or part of the entire West Bank. The West Bank, which never belonged to any entity known as Palestine, belonged to Jordan before the 1967 war.

While many protest a UN vote for a Palestine that has openly stated that it would not allow Jews inside their country, a state of Apartheid, Americans are also out in the streets protesting the arrival of Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The New York based advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran, is protesting outside the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan where Ahmadinejad is staying.

“Ahmadinejad is the leader of a criminal regime allied with al-Qaeda and other terrorists, and guilty of atrocious human rights violations,” the group said in a statement. “Would the Warwick be willing to accommodate Osama bin Laden’s successor Ayman al-Zawahiri were he to visit Manhattan?”

TIME: Photos of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath Rarely seen photos from the Fresh Kills landfill. Digging out Ground Zero … Workers continue to search for victims of the World Trade Center attack …http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/911/

During a carefully coordinated attack, 19 hijackers seize four US passenger airliners in the eastern United States. Two of them crash into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, and a third crashes into the Pentagon, headquarters of the US Defense Department, near Washington, DC. The fourth plane, also on its way to Washington, crashes prematurely in a field in Pennsylvania after its crew and passengers attack the hijackers. In all, nearly 3000 people are killed. The World Trade Center towers, each 107 stories high, collapse completely within a few hours of the attacks, killing or injuring hundreds of firefighters, police officers, and other rescue workers.

On the ground, US investigators determine that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda group is responsible. At 8.30 pm, President George Bush addresses the nation, saying, “Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil. The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing has filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger.” The president says the US government will track down the perpetrators and “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed the acts and those who harbor them.”

September 20, 2001

President Bush addresses a joint session of Congress. He says that the September 11 terrorists are members of al-Qaeda, whose members “practice a fringe form of of Islamic extremism . . . whose directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans and make no distinction between military and civilians, including women and children .http://books.google.com/books?id=RIwBFpBi5noC&pg=PA309

BBC News – Chilling new 9/11 audio released

08 September 11 15:21 ET

– Threats from one of the lead hijackers, Mohammed Atta, are also heard…

‘Nobody move’

One of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, is heard on the same plane saying: “Nobody move, everything will be OK.

“If you try to make any moves, you will injure yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”

NEW YORK — Newly posted audio files depict the horror of 9/11 unfolding in the sky, as air traffic controllers struggled to follow the faint tracks of hijacked planes, fighter jets tried in vain to chase them down and a flight attendant made a desperate appeal for help.

View full size[http://media.nola.com/politics/photo/9-11jpg-cb6fb316ba188171.jpg]Associated Press
archiveOn Sept. 11, 2001, the twin towers of the World Trade Center burn after hijacked planes crashed into them in New York.

The sound files add a layer of emotion to previously published transcripts, as puzzlement and frustration seeps into the voices of controllers, military commanders, and even pilots watching the attacks from the sky. There are shouting and ringing phones in the background — the soundtrack, usually omitted from written transcripts, of a nation suddenly at war.

In one chilling excerpt, screaming and a shouted “Hey!” is heard over the radio as hijackers storm the cockpit of United Flight 93. That’s followed by a strange, strained cry. Stunned controllers and other pilots discuss the sounds, trying to make sense of what they heard.

“No dry words on a page can capture that; you really have to hear it,” said John Farmer, dean of the Rutgers University School of Law and former senior counsel to the government’s 9/11 Commission.

Listen at your own discretion. There is no foul language, but the intense situation and reliving of these moments can be powerful and disturbing.

The sound files were posted online Wednesday, just days before the 10th
anniversary of the attacks, to accompany a monograph published by the Rutgers University Law Review[http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~review/].
The release was first reported by The New York Times.

The monograph was written by Farmer and other investigators working for the 9/11 Commission but was not completed by the time the commission released its final report in 2004.

Farmer and another investigator, Miles Kara, decided to finish the document and add the audio after their draft and the original Federal Aviation Administration recordings were declassified last year.

Law school students helped review and edit the recordings.

Most of recordings come from the FAA and are of controllers and the military liaisons working with them. But some come from other sources, including a phone call that Betty Ong, a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, placed to the airline.

“Somebody’s stabbed in business class, and, um I think there is Mace that we can’t breathe,” Ong says. “I don’t know, I think we’re getting hijacked.”

After Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center, tapes recorded the conversation among controllers as a second plane streaked past the window of a radar control facility on its way to Manhattan.

“Another one just hit the building,” someone says.

Another person responds: “Oh my God.”

And then: “Another one just hit it hard. … Another one just hit the World Trade.”

It’s followed by: “The whole building just, ah, came apart.”

Someone utters again: “Oh my God.”

Some original recordings from 9/11 still have not been made public, including military communications, discussions among White House officials, and the cockpit voice recorder from Flight 93.

Farmer listened to the cockpit voice recording during the 9/11 Commission investigation. He said it is a stirring record of the hijacking and of the passengers’ attempt to retake control of the plane before it crashed near Shanksville, Pa.

Much of the audio released Wednesday has been previously documented in hearings, lawsuits and various government reports. Farmer himself included many of the transcripts in a 2009 book, “The Ground Truth.”

But the actual voices of confused controllers and pilots underscores the chaos in the sky that morning, especially in the first minutes after the hijackers swung their airliners off course and turned off the aircrafts’ transponders, making it difficult for radar to track them.

The military learned about the hijacking of Flight 11 nine minutes before it crashed into the World Trade Center, and was never notified about the other hijackings before those planes crashed.

“The confusion on that day is something that we sometimes forget about,” said Andrew Gimigliano, editor-in-chief of the Rutgers Law Review. “The idea that hijacked planes would be used in that manner just was not something that people were thinking about, and this is really illustrative of what the real tenor was on that morning.”

By Chris Hawley, Associated Press

Associated Press writer Kiley Armstrong in New York contributed to this report.

9/11 anniversary: 114 audio recordings over attacks released
The most complete picture of the confusion among air traffic controllers, pilots and the military during the terrifying chaos of the 9/11 hijackings has been released ahead of the 10th anniverasy of the attacks.

By Nick Allen, Los Angeles

6:02PM BST 08 Sep 2011

The chilling collection of 114 audio recordings spans two hours and captures the desperate efforts of those involved to understand and deal with the unfolding atrocity.

Parts of the audio recordings have been aired before, but others had not been heard and were held in the National Archives.

Days ahead of the 10th anniversary of the attacks, they have now been published in an unprecedented blow-by-blow recreation of events.

The recordings begin at 8.13am when air traffic controllers in Boston lose touch with American Airlines Flight 11. Six minutes later flight attendant Betty Ong, tells the ground: “Somebody’s stabbed in business class, and I think there is Mace that we can’t breathe. I don’t know, I think we’re getting hijacked!”

At 8.24am the voice of hijacker Mohamed Atta can be heard saying the plane is returning to the airport. He says: “Nobody move, everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves, you will injure yourself and the aeroplane. Just stay quiet.”

The tapes show how ground controllers desperately tried to keep up with events. Sixteen minutes after the first hijacked plane hit the World Trade Centre a radio transmission was received at the New York air traffic control radar centre telling them to look out their window at a low flying aircraft.

Before the radar control manager had time to identify it the plane hit the second tower. He can be heard saying: “The whole building just came apart.” After one plane had already hit, and with the second moments from impact, an air traffic control manager in New York called the Federal Aviation Administration headquarters in Herndon, Virginia to ask if military jets were being scrambled. The reply from Virginia came: “Why, what’s going on?”

In Washington a military official called the FAA centre there to be told American Airlines Flight 77 had already been missing for 30 minutes.

An FAA official told him: “Last time I talked to them, they said that it was east of York. And I don’t even know what state that is.”

During the chaos an unidentified pilot is heard asking over the airwaves: “Anybody know what that smoke is in lower Manhattan?”

In another recording someone asks: “Is, is this real world or exercise?”

The recordings were originally compiled as an “audio monograph” for the 9/11 Commsission but the work was not completed in time before the commission concluded its business.

Miles Kara, a commission investigator, found the remaining files in the National Archives and transcribed them with the help of Rutgers University.

They were published by The Rutgers Law Review and first reported by the New York Times.

Mr Kara told the New York Times: “The story of the day of 9/11 itself is best told in the voices of 9/11.”

Two recordings have still not been published. One is a 30-minute tape from the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers stormed the hijackers. Families of victims objected to it being released.

A recording of a conference call which started at 9.28am and involved then Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is also not included.

The vast majority of the 9/11 Commission’s investigative records remain sealed at the National Archives in Washington.

The records occupy a space of 575 cubic feet, and the commission had directed that most of them be made public in 2009.

Items still not public include a 30-page summary of an interview the commission conducted with President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in April 2004.

:: President Barack Obama said al-Qaeda had tried to “terrorise” Americans through the attacks but was “no match for our resilience.” President Obama, who will visit Ground Zero and the Pentagon on the anniversary, said al-Qaeda was “on the path to defeat.”

The terror timeline: year by year, day by day, minute by minute : a comprehensive chronicle of the road to 9/11— and America’s response – Paul Thompson, Center for Cooperative Research – HarperCollins, 2004 – 590 pages

The September 11 Digital Archive Uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania and the public …http://www.911digitalarchive.org/

9/11 Islamic Terror Hits Americaby Jerry Gordon & Catherine Martin (Sept. 2008)On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists, well educated young men – Saudi Egyptian, and Yemeni nationals – hijacked and flew four airliners (American Airlines Flight 11 and United Flight 175 from Boston’s Logan airport, American Airlines Flight 77 from Dulles airport and United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark Airport), with captive passengers aboard, into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia and one, due to brave actions of the passengers aboard, having been diverted from crashing into the Capital building in Washington, crashed into a field in southwestern Pennsylvania instead.These Muslim terrorists killed more people than the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 – over 3,000. They didn’t discriminate in their mindless slaughter whether their victims were Christians, Jews, fellow Muslims, Buddhists or Hindus. Economic losses from the unprovoked attack ran into the billions. Trauma touched hundreds of millions in America and around the globe. The names Osama bin Laden and Ayman al- Zawahiri of al Qaeda became front page news. Only the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has been captured. He confessed and is now being put on trial.

The country was suddenly adrift in the wake of this disastrous ‘Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century.’ In the years that followed 9/11, our country’s military found itself enmeshed in the long war against the network of Islamic Jihad terror groups in Afghanistan, Iraq and world-wide, costing thousands of casualties and billions of dollars to prosecute. Over ten thousand Islamic terror attacks have occurred, since 9/11. Hundreds of thousands have died or been horribly injured from these jihad attacks. Attacks like those made by Indonesian Islamists on a crowded Bali nightspot on October 12, 2002 favored by Australians, by Moroccan al Qaeda affiliates on commuter trains in Madrid on March 11, 2004, and by native born British Muslims on the bus and underground system in London on July 7, 2005.Muslim young people, we suddenly learned, are being indoctrinated in fundamentalist Islam in Mosques and Madrassas throughout the world’s Muslim community of believers – the ummah. These believers are collectively engaged in a jihad, or struggle, to remove all obstacles to the spread and ultimate dominance of Islam. One of these obstacles is the Constitution of the United States of America. This effort is being financed with billions of petro-dollars from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates. Terms like Londonistan, and Eurabia are now commonly used to describe the Islamization and infiltration of the U.K. and the E.U. by Muslim advocacy groups demanding enclaves ruled by Islamic Sharia law.

Instead of rejecting and stifling this hate-filled Islamic doctrine threatening America, our national leaders have resorted to an ostrich-like pose to avoid this reality. Terms like “Islamist,” “Jihad,” and “Islamic terror” have been officially banned from national and homeland security lexicons. Our government treats Saudi Arabia as a “valued ally” while the latter fosters hatred of everything we stand for.To commemorate September eleventh, we are publishing two recollections of the trauma and horrors of that day. Contributing Editor Jerry Gordon recalls his experience in New York , while Act for America Northern Virginia chapter leader, Catherine Martin recalls what occurred in the terror attack on the Pentagon.Both Gordon and Martin have been motivated by their experiences to become citizen activists. Their mission is to inform Americans of the threat Islam poses here at home and abroad and to oppose its advance here. Such recollections hopefully will re-kindle efforts to combat the Islamic doctrine that killed and injured thousands on 9/11. http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/25722/sec_id/25722

Leaked documents offer few glimpses of bin Laden

CNN – Katie Glaeser – Pam Benson – 27 Jul 2010 (CNN) — The recently released cache of U.S. reports from Afghanistan provides fleeting glimpses into the possible whereabouts of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the years since his escape from American forces at Tora Bora. Documents released by the whistle-blower website Wikileaks and published in the British newspaper The Guardian quoted intelligence sources as saying bin Laden wanted al Qaeda operatives disguised as journalists to attack Afghan President Hamid Karzai during a news conference in 2004. In 2005, his financial adviser and an Afghan insurgent leader reportedly were dispatched to obtain rockets from North Korea to use against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. In 2006, he was reported to be attending monthly meetings in the Pakistani city of Quetta with fellow fugitives from the leadership of the Taliban, the Islamic militia that hosted al Qaeda when it controlled most of Afghanistan. Another report the same year states that he arranged a marriage for a valued lieutenant, a specialist in building roadside bombs. Neither the documents cited only by the Guardian, which had advance access to the Wikileaks documents released Sunday, nor the information contained in them could be independently verified by CNN. The CIA would not comment on secret documents. But a U.S. counterterrorism official said on condition of anonymity that American authorities believe that the al Qaeda leader “has gone into deep hiding.” “We think he’s spending a heck of a lot of time trying to avoid being captured or killed,” the official said. “After all, he’s seen many of his top lieutenants taken off the battlefield since 9/11 — and especially over the past two years. We haven’t had a firm fix on his location for a number of years. If we did, he wouldn’t be there. The aggressive search for him continues without pause.” Bin Laden’s organization carried out the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people and triggered the nearly 9-year-old Afghan war. The U.S. government has put a $25 million price on his head, but he has evaded capture. In 2005, then-CIA Director Porter Goss told Time magazine that he had “an excellent idea” where bin Laden was but said that until “some weak links” were strengthened, “We’re probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice.” And in June, current CIA chief Leon Panetta told ABC’s “This Week” that bin Laden “is in an area of the tribal areas of Pakistan,” but there had been no precise information about his possible whereabouts for several years. “Since then, it has been very difficult to get any intelligence on his exact location,” Panetta said. An August 2006 threat report included in the Wikileaks cache notes that a “high-level meeting” in Quetta resulted in six suicide bombers being dispatched to targets in northern Afghanistan. The meetings “take place once every month,” either in Quetta or in villages along the Afghan-Pakistani border, “and there are usually about twenty people present,” it states. “The top four people in these meetings are Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden, Mullah Dadullah and Mullah Barader (PHON),” it states. Like bin Laden, Omar, the leader of the Taliban, has been at large since the invasion. His deputy, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, was reported captured in Pakistan this year, and Dadullah was killed in a U.S. airstrike in May 2007. Another report states that Afghan insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar joined bin Laden’s financial adviser, identified as “Dr. Amin,” on a trip from Iran to North Korea in November 2005. “While in North Korea, the two confirmed a deal with the North Korean government for remote-controlled rockets for use against American and coalition aircraft,” the report states. “The deal was closed for an undetermined amount of money. The shipment of said weapons is expected shortly after the new year.” Hekmatyar, a onetime prime minister who fought against the Soviets in the 1980s, now leads an Afghan militia that has aligned itself with the Taliban against U.S. and allied troops.http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/07/27/afghanistan.wikileaks.bin.laden

Awlaki: The New Bin Laden? – Newsweek 24 May 2010 … Awlaki: The New Bin Laden? With the release of a provocative new video to justify killings of American civilians, Yemen-based cleric Anwar …U.S. officials say they have good reason to focus so much attention on Awlaki. After being vigorously investigated by the FBI years ago over his ties to two of the 9/11 hijackers, Awlaki has received renewed attention in recent months because of his e-mail exchanges with Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, as well as his suspected links with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian student who attempted to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight headed to Detroit on Christmas Day. Awlaki (whose command of the English language enables him to communicate to alienated English-speaking Muslims in ways that other radical clerics cannot) seemed to affirm his links with both men in the video, describing them as his “students” and saying of Hasan: “What he did was heroic and great…I ask every Muslim serving in the U.S. Army to follow suit.” http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/2010/05/24/awlaki-the-new-bin-laden-.html

Bin Laden Claims Responsibility for 9/11 – U.S. … Bin Laden Claims Responsibility for 9/11, Usama bin Laden made his first televised appearance in more than a year in which he admitted for the first time … http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,137095,00.html

DOHA, Qatar (CNN) — An Arabic-language television network has aired a previously unseen videotape of Osama bin Laden showing the accused terrorist mastermind sitting with a top deputy who claims credit for the September 11 attacks in the United States. http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/04/15/terror.tape/

‘Palestinians’ Dance, Celebrate

[New York Times] Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers and Hit Pentagon… But in the West Bank city of Nablus, rejoicing Palestinians, who have been locked in a bitter struggle with Israel for almost a year, went into the streets to chant, “God is great!” and to distribute candies to celebrate the attacks. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0911.html

Palestinians celebrate [Daily Star, Sep. 12, 2001] ˜Support to our intifada’ Mohammed ZaatariDaily Star correspondentPalestinian refugees spilled into the streets of their shantytowns in Lebanon to rejoice at the carnage in New York and Washington on Tuesday, defying their own leadership’s firm condemnation of the apparent terrorist strikes.Refugees toured the Ain al-Hilweh camp near Sidon, firing their rifles in the air in a noisy display of glee.“Whoever protects terror should know how to protect himself,” one elderly man said.Women ululated and bagpipers played patriotic songs as the refugees converged on the vegetable market, the largest square in the camp. Shopowners handed out sweets as small television sets aired time and again images of the World Trade Center’s twin towers on fire and tumbling down after the attacks.The cheering grew louder when the television spots shifted to the American capital to show a section of the Pentagon on fire after it had been hit by a third aircraft.The scenes were similar in the camps of Rashidieh, near Tyre; Bourj al-Barajneh in Beirut; and in the North’s Nahr al-Bared, where Palestinian frustration with American support for Israel during the latest violence has been on the rise.“What happened to America today vindicates the Palestinians and all those suffering the injustice this big power has been imposing on the world,” said Ain al-Hilweh’s Ahmad Hussein, who is in his late teens.Fatima Khalil said: “It’s like an earthquake that proves that justice will ultimately triumph. This lends support to our intifada.”Issam Mohammed, in his early teens, said that he wanted to see President Bush “lying in the basement somewhere, fearful for his life, to understand what the Palestinians are going through day after day.”Nearby young men and women sang together: “Where to? To Ramallah. Where to? To Ramallah.” http://web.archive.org/web/20010918220843/http://dailystar.com.lb/12_09_01/art31.htm

snopes.com: Palestinians Dancing in the StreetClaim: CNN used old footage to fake images of ‘Palestinians dancing in the street’ after the terrorist attack on the USA. Status: False. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/cnn.asp

FOXNews – Arafat Horrified by Attacks, but Thousands of Palestinians Celebrate; Rest of World OutragedWednesday, September 12, 2001

As thousands of Palestinians celebrated in the West Bank and in Lebanese refugee camps, governments across the globe offered condolences to an America that looked more vulnerable than ever after Tuesday’s terror attacks. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34187,00.html

Rejoicing in the streets of Jenin – Middle East – Salon.com

Tuesday, Sep 11, 2001 17:08 ET

Rejoicing in the streets of JeninWhile many Palestinians celebrate the attack on the U.S., Yasser Arafat denounces it as “unacceptable” and Israelis mourn. By Flore de Préneuf JENIN, West Bank — In Jenin, they know a good terrorist attack when they hear about it. The walls of people’s homes here are covered with posters glorifying Islamic terrorists and Palestinian “martyrs.” The area, in the northern West Bank, has produced more suicide bombers than any other Palestinian town since the beginning of the intifada nearly a year ago. Most recently Jenin operatives lent a hand to the Israeli Arab kamikaze who killed three Israelis and wounded dozens of others at a train station Sunday. Israeli tanks moved in Monday night to seal off the area in an effort to stop local terrorists from carrying out further attacks on Israel. But Palestinian militants have never achieved terror of the magnitude seen today in the United States. When young armed Palestinians patrolling the streets of a refugee camp in Jenin heard the news from New York and Washington, they chuckled with glee. One of them thanked God for his mighty revenge against the United States, Israel’s ally and main weapons supplier. Elsewhere in the West Bank and in Gaza, thousands of Palestinians applauded the devastating blows, cheering openly in the streets and distributing celebratory candy to passersby. Some shouted that they hoped Tel Aviv would be next or vowed to complete what they believe Osama bin Laden has started. Indeed, people here think Osama bin Laden is a more likely suspect for the attacks than Palestinian groups. The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Damascus-based Marxist organization that initially claimed and then rejected responsibility for the terrorist attacks, has only a tiny following among Palestinians and has little “street credibility.” Of course, there is still no proof that any figure from the Arab world has anything to do with the attack — Oklahoma City, too, was first blamed on Muslim forces — but that didn’t dampen the celebration here. The loud rejoicing, however, was far from universal. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat expressed his condolences to President Bush and condemned the crime as “dangerous and unacceptable.” Palestinian legislator and spokeswoman for the Arab League Hanan Ashrawi called it “a horrible act of absolute immorality, viciousness and evil.” Israelis, for their part, greeted the news with angst and disbelief as if the terror attack had happened on their soil. Many Jews have relatives in the United States. But beyond the family link, there’s a very strong identification with the victims of terrorism, given Israel’s long and tragic experience with suicide bombers, booby-trapped cars and deadly ambushes. Israelis interviewed on national television also expressed the hope that America would “finally understand” and stop condemning Israel for the protective and retaliatory measures it has taken over the past year in its fight against Palestinian activism. Many hoped that the bond between Israel and the U.S. against evil (widely assumed to be Islamic) will be stronger now that the strikes have brought home the price of fanaticism. In material terms, Israel’s security was also directly affected by the assaults on New York and Washington. Israel closed its air space to flights from abroad, put its air force on high alert and evacuated its embassy and consulates in the United States. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has offered to send rescue teams to the United States. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/11/west_bank/index.html

World reaction to terrorism in US | World news | The Guardian Palestinian joy – global condemnation Sarah Hall, Suzanne Goldenberg and John Hooper The Guardian, Wednesday 12 September 2001 16.31 BST

Palestinian gunmen at refugee camps in Lebanon fired into the air in celebration yesterday as the rest of the world united in revulsion at the ‘monstrous’ and ‘abhorrent’ attacks in the US. In East Jerusalem, people distributed sweets wrapped in the colours of the Palestinian tricolour and sounded car horns.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,550498,00.html

A group of children near east Jerusalem’s Old City waved Palestinian flags and chanted anti-U.S slogans as they reacted to the news of a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Associated Press photo by Lefteris Pitarakis Credit: LEFTERIS PITARAKIS

2001-09-12 04:00:00 PST Jerusalem — While Israel declared a national day of mourning yesterday to show solidarity with its staunch ally, Palestinians on the West Bank celebrated the terrorist attacks in the United States by handing out sweets, firing guns in the air and chanting, “God is great.”

Israeli officials said flags would fly at half staff, while political and military figures called for a united international front against sponsors of terrorism.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told U.S. Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer that Israel was prepared to render any and all necessary assistance.

“This criminal attack on innocent civilians in the United States is a turning point in the war against world terror,” said Sharon in a late-night televised address. “It is a war of good against evil.”

Fearing that strikes on its strongest ally could spill into its own backyard, Israel closed Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport to all international traffic for at least 24 hours, evacuated its embassies worldwide, beefed up its already-high state of alert around U.S. installations and put its air force on the lookout for any unauthorized planes nearing Israeli airspace.

The government also closed all border crossings in a continuing effort to clamp down on Palestinian terrorists infiltrating into Israel as part of their nearly one-year uprising, which has claimed 700 lives, most of them Palestinians.

“I was in New York yesterday and ironically I feel safer now in Israel,” said Paul Frosh, a lecturer in communications at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a paramedic in the army reserve. “Security is much tighter here.”

Global responses to terrorism: 9/11, Afghanistan, and beyondMary E. A. Buckley, Rick Fawn – 2003 – 334 pages – Page 156Shikaki showed that support amongst the Palestinians for the peace process dropped from 44 percent in 1995/96 (when … cause was not helped by footage of Palestinians dancing and rejoicing in the streets of West Bank towns after 9/11.http://books.google.com/books?id=OcKYZdopjJkC&pg=PA156

A Superpower’s Sorrow, ComeuppanceAMERICA ATTACKED | WORLD REACTION Geopolitics: Critics of the U.S. see the attacks as a lesson to temper the arrogance and double standards of a relatively young global leader.September 13, 2001|RICHARD BOUDREAUX | TIMES STAFF WRITERROME –There is no shortage of reasons in much of the world to dislike the United States. From European capitals to the coca fields of South America to the assembly lines of Southeast Asia, the nation can appear arrogant and selfishly fixated on its own politics and interests.

Its unparalleled power makes it a lightning rod for a host of grievances brought by allies, adversaries and outright enemies.

Ghoulish scenes of Palestinians dancing and rejoicing over Tuesday’s mass slaughter in New York and Washington are only the most extreme and recent public expression of anti-Americanism–or at least a wariness of American power–that has followed the United States’ rise as a superpower, through conflicts in the Cold War and since.http://articles.latimes.com/2001/sep/13/news/mn-45281

BEIRUT – Palestinians in Lebanon greeted the news of devastating attacks on American targets yesterday with jubilant gunfire, dancing and cheering, saying Israel’s chief backer deserved such a punishment. ..

Celebratory firing rattled across Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and the West Bank, however, as soon as television stations broke the news, carrying live footage of New York buildings on fire and collapsing and terrified Americans fleeing the carnage.

Jubilant Palestinians took to the streets of refugee camps in Lebanon and the West Bank, waving Palestinian flags and distributing sweets to celebrate the attacks on major U.S. landmarks and government offices.

Some Lebanese shared the joy. ..

Lebanon is home to some 360,000 Palestinian refugees. .. Ordinary Egyptians too said the United States deserved the deadly attacks… Samira Mohamed, a 26-year-old lawyer, said she was delighted by news of the attacks… Palestinians who have often burned U.S. flags in protests during their 11-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation also celebrated in Arab East Jerusalem… Several dozen Palestinian youths gathered in East Jerusalem to celebrate, honking out wedding tunes on their car horns… In Nablus, motorists honked horns and gunmen fired into the air to cheer on the attacks which unfolded within a few hours and stunned people around the globe.

Israel and the Palestinians have been locked in fighting since the Palestinian uprising against occupation erupted last September after peace talks stalled.

Reaction was mixed elsewhere in Lebanon. Many people, used to wars, bombardment and destruction of their cities, watched the news in disbelief and shock.

“Who could believe this is happening in the capitals of the world’s only superpower?,” said one Beirut resident.

Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri was quick to offer condolences to U.S. President Georges W. Bush. “These tragic actions contradict all human and religious values,” Hariri said in a statement.

RAMALLAH – The Palestinian Authority has muzzled coverage of Palestinian celebrations of the Islamic suicide attacks against the United States.

Palestinian sources said PA officials stopped several television crews from broadcasting Palestinian celebrations of the suicide jet crashes in New York and Washington. They said PA Information Minister Yasser Abbed Rabbo and his aides telephoned foreign broadcast crews and said the PA would not be able to guarantee their safety if the footage is broadcast.

The sources said Fatah agents loyal to PA Chairman Yasser Arafat warned cameramen to either hand over their videotape or refuse to relay footage of Palestinian celebrations for international broadcast.

The result, the sources said, is that virtually all television crews failed to broadcast the tape of the celebrations. They said this includes PA officers and Fatah gunmen in the West Bank firing in the air to celebrate the kamikaze attacks. The wildest celebrations were reported in Nablus.

In Ramallah, Fatah gunmen captured a Palestinian television cameraman who worked for a major news agency. The gunmen warned he would be killed if the footage filmed of Palestinian celebrations is aired.

For his part, Arafat has expressed outrage over the attacks. On Wednesday, Arafat donated blood for the victims of the U.S. suicide missions.

At the same time, Abbed Rabbo appealed to Palestinians not to publicly display happiness over the attacks in the United States. The information minister told PA radio that such expressions would harm Palestinian interests.

Television journalists refused to publicly acknowledge the pressure. They said most of the Palestinian celebrations were broadcast.

“We are doing our work as well as we should,” Connie Mus, a former chairman of the Foreign Press Association, said.

[VIDEO = AUTHENTIC!] Watch – “Rejoicing in the streets of Jenin”“Rumors of War: ‘CNN used old footage to fake images of ‘Palestinians dancing in the street’ after the terrorist attack on the USA'” (Urban Legends Reference Pages, 2001/09/23) “No, CNN did not air decade-old footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets. Eason Jordan, CNN’s Chief News Executive, confirmed that the video used on CNN was in fact shot on Tuesday, 11 September 2001, in East Jerusalem by a Reuters TV crew, not during the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990-91… … Reuters, the international news agency whose camera crew shot the footage, issued the following statement: “Reuters rejects as utterly baseless an allegation being circulated by e-mail and the Internet claiming that it circulated 10-year-old videotape to illustrate Palestinians celebrating in the wake of the September 11 tragedies in the United States. Reuters welcomes a statement by the Universidad Estatal de Campinas-Brasil (UNICAMP), one of whose students was the author of the original e-mail, setting the record straight.The videotape in question was shot in East Jerusalem by a Reuters camera crew on September 11 in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the United States. The footage was broadcast by CNN and other subscribers to the Reuters video news service.'”.http://web.archive.org/web/20080423033645/http://watch.windsofchange.net/themes_09.htm

2002

[H.A.S.C. No. 107-27]

ARE YASSER ARAFAT AND THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY CREDIBLE PARTNERS FOR PEACE?

HEARING BEFORE THE SPECIAL OVERSIGHT PANEL ON TERRORISM OF THE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

HEARING HELD

JUNE 6, 2002

Ms. Ehrenfeld, if you would like to begin, if you are ready, at this time.

STATEMENT OF RACHEL EHRENFELD, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF CORRUPTION AND THE RULE OF LAW (CSC)

Ms. EHRENFELD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is my honor to contribute to the committee’s important deliberations on the question, are Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority credible partners for peace?

[…]

Israel is just the testing ground. Quite simply, as long as Arafat controls the Palestinian Authority’s funds and his current, corrupt leadership remains in power, no real reform is possible. This is clear in the institutionalized rhetoric of incitement-against both Israel and the U.S.-which has become endemic to the Palestinian press.

On August 30, 2001, only days before the World Trade Center attack, the Palestinian paper Al-Ayyam relayed the following message: The Palestinians—this is a quote—the Palestinians must harm American interests in the Arab world, with all possible means, in all places, at all levels, because the U.S. Does not understand the language of logic and wisdom, but only the language of interests and force.

Pictures of Palestinian mobs burning American flags demonstrate the sentiment all the time.

On September 11, the day the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, the official daily of Arafat’s PA, Al Hayat Al Jadida, said that the suicide bombers of today are the noble successors of their noble predecessors—the Lebanese suicide bombers, who taught the U.S. Marines a tough lesson in Lebanon.

Pictures of Palestinians celebrating following the World Trade Center attack were carried by CNN and seen all over the world. Here are a few pictures of Palestinian rallies praising the suicide bombers and burning the American flag, as well as pictures carried in similar rallies praising Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia,
Committee on International Relations,
Washington, DC.

Mrs. Davis.

Mrs. DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I guess, Ambassador Ross, it was interesting to hear you say you had your doubts as to whether Mr. Arafat was any different today than he was a year ago. And I guess, hearing the comments that I am hearing Ambassador Walker saying that he is not a terrorist, yet several weeks ago we were talking about this bad guy over there who performed or allowed terrorist activities, and then today we are hearing that we are going to use everything we can to fight the terrorist activities with Osama bin Laden, including maybe using Chairman Arafat.

And I guess my question to you is that, we all saw, and it has been referenced today, the dancing in the streets on September 11th by the Palestinians, and can we trust Chairman Arafat?
Should we be approaching him to help us in this?

LEGISLATION TO DENY U.S. TAXPAYER MONEY TO ARAFAT AND THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY — (Senate – June 12, 2002)

[Page: S5447] GPO’s PDF

— Mr. SMITH of New Hampshire. Mr. President, I rise today in support of my legislation to prohibit any U.S. taxpayer money from ending up in the hands of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian authority.

Unfortunately, Yasser Arafat is not a partner in the peace process.

As long as the United States continues to provide money to the Palestinian authority through grants to non-governmental organizations, some of that money will end up in the hands of those who wish to do harm to Israel.

We must stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel in the war against terrorism.

We must also send a clear message to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership that the United States will not tolerate terrorism against Israel.

Israel is a true friend and ally.

And, as a Nation, we share many of the same values–democracy, respect for human rights, freedom of the press, a strong desire for peace and prosperity, to name but a few.

During the Camp David summit in July of 2000, it was Israel that was prepared to make tremendous concessions to ensure peace in the Region.

As we all know today, Arafat refused to reach a peace agreement, and walked away from the negotiating table.

Yasser Arafat did not want peace because he needs the conflict for them to stay in power.

Instead of peace, they chose terror.

My staff has compiled a list of terrorist attacks on Israel last year. In 2001, 79 attacks cost 160 innocent Israelis their lives, and wounded another 1,200. Since then, of course, we have all seen the tremendous cost in human lives and misery from many more terrorist attacks on innocent civilians, and the resulting isolation of Yasser Arafat and the civilized world’s condemnation of the Palestinian authority.

We dare not forget the level of terror visited upon Israel by Palestinian terrorists.

Arafat is using his own personal forces to attack Israel through suicide attacks.

Furthermore, he is allowing Hamas and Islamic Jihad safe harbor in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad are two of the most heinous terrorist organizations in the world, responsible for the deaths of numerous innocent people.

Keep in mind, at one time, Arafat promised to get rid of these organizations.

[Page: S5448] GPO’s PDF Arafat’s promises are worth nothing.

It is wrong to ask American taxpayers to subsidize the Palestinian authority when Yasser Arafat uses the resources of the Palestinian authority to attack innocent men, women, and children in Israel.

We have seen video footage of the Palestinian people cheering and dancing in the streets after the September 11th attacks–many holding posters of Saddam Hussein.

Yet, while we have sanctions against Iraq, we are providing millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian authority through non-governmental organizations.

We know well that any funds, even designated as humanitarian, free up money that Arafat can use for his army of human bombers.

If there is any doubt in anybody’s mind that Yasser Arafat promotes terrorism, I would like you to consider the order on the official letterhead of the presidential bureau of the Palestinian authority/Palestine liberation organization, bearing the signature of Yasser Arafat just 8 days after our country was attacked on 911, ordering $600 be paid from the treasury of the Palestine authority to each of three terrorists. Two of them are senior activists of the Fatah terrorist group, and one of these, Ziad Da’as, is the head of the group behind a recent deadly terrorist attack on a bat-mitzvah party in Israel. The Israeli defense ministry says they recently captured this document at Arafat’s office in Ramallah.

There Was a Time – Page 52
George Burlbaugh – 2006 – 144 pages – Preview

Many of these Muslims, if not actively involved in terrorism are quietly encouraging it and they must stop. When 9-11 took so many lives in the United States, Palestinians danced and sang in the streets!

Avraham Burg, who was speaker of the Knesset from 1999 to 2003, is no longer shocked at the Palestinian response to … many Palestinians danced in the streets upon hearing the news of 9/11, which pretty much says it all..

Habits of mind tending to sanction terror are becoming ingrained in the Muslim world, sanctioned by the lethargy and prejudice in Europe: those Palestinians who danced for joy on 9/11 and those students who staged the grisly exhibition …

The Catholic world report
[Ignatius Press,] 2001 – Snippet view [Page 23]
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon celebrate upon hearing the news of the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11,.. it is impossible to ignore the danger of terrorism. In standing up to the West,…

by PROFESSOR JOHN CASEY, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

The attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon constitute the most comprehensively bloody and destructive single terrorist outrage since the Second World War. Indeed, this is the most dramatic such act since terrorism became a modern political tactic.
You could even compare it with the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbour.

Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire and Islamic militant, had warned three weeks ago of ‘an unprecedented attack’ on U.S. interests.
Whoever carried out this amazing attack upon the heart of American military and financial power, they have abilities and planning far beyond anything we have ever previously imagined.

If the point of terrorism is propaganda as well as destroying particular targets and persons, then these attacks have achieved a propaganda coup of scarcely paralleled proportions.

To get The White House closed down as a precaution, and most American cities paralysed as well, is to produce the sort of mass terror you would normally expect from nuclear war.

Is this the Wrath of Islam against the U.S? Whoever these terrorists were, they sacrificed themselves, murdered the airline passengers and were ready to kill thousands on the ground.

If they indeed were Palestinians or their allies, can we understand why they carried out such a revolting crime?

To begin to comprehend it you have to be aware of the greatest mass hatred in the modern world –that of millions throughout the Arab and the larger Moslem world against the state of Israel, and against their overwhelmingly most important backers, the Americans.

If you need evidence of this, you need only look at the TV pictures of Palestinians dancing on the streets of Jerusalem to celebrate yesterday’s attack.

There is no doubt the mass of people in the Middle East believe the existence and continued survival of Israel is purely the result of a Western conspiracy – a conspiracy to divide and rule the Arabs, and to dominate countries at the heart of Islam.
The detonator for the devastating explosion of rage fuelled by this belief was primed back when the Western powers set up the Jewish state which occupies the third holiest site of Islam.

In the West we think of Israel as an embattled, besieged country, one that shares our values, our beliefs in the rule of law, democracy and human rights. But talk to anyone in a Middle Eastern city and you find a very different story.

There, the overwhelming perception is of the Arab countries of the Middle East brought to their knees by a state armed to the teeth by the Americans with weapons incomparably superior to any that even the most dependable Americanallies – Egypt and Saudi Arabia- would ever be allowed to get their hands on.

They see many of their rulers as puppets of the Americans, corrupt and self- seeking. They see the peace process with Israel as a snare and a delusion. It shocks us in the West to hear this, but there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein is the hero of the Arab masses, the new Nasser.
The implications are terrifying. The orthodox view of Islam is that it forms an umma – a community –and as it spread throughout the globe, the dream was kept alive that it is a world-wide community of faith, symbolised by the pilgrimage to Mecca.

For centuries there were caliphs or ‘commanders of the faithful’, successors of the Prophet Mohammed, who ruled the entire Community of the Faithful. For foreign non-Moslems to erupt into and dominate the heart of this community is something that it is impossible for devout Moslems in their hearts ever to accept.

One of the chief claims of Islam is to be a religion of justice – that it will establish a just society that obeys God’s laws. The enemies of
this ideal are often called ‘the corrupt of the earth’.

Jihad means individual spiritual struggle – but it also contains the command to struggle against those who perpetrate injustice and corruption, or who are the avowed enemies of Islam.

It is impossible to over-estimate how powerful these ideas are in the Moslem world. Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries that seem stable on the surface are honeycombed, or eaten away from within, by the rising tide of religious feeling…

The Soviets invaded Afghanistan and provoked an immense, heroic resistance that eventually – and inevitably – became a religious war against all enemies of Islam, and then against Moslems of the wrong sects and tribes.

The Americans helped organise the Afghan resistance, encouraging the anti-Communist Moslems. Indirectly they helped create the fanatical, intolerant Taliban and its allies who have long since turned their attention to the Middle East.

MOSLEM countries through the ages have been centres of high culture and advanced civilisation. Usually they have extended to Christians and Jews – the ‘peoples of the book’ -a high degree of toleration which Christians have begun to reciprocate only quite recently.

But the fact is that millions of people in the Moslem world have become convinced that they are victims of a conspiracy, and that is the best possible feeding ground for fanaticism.

And it could not be more fanatical than to carry out such a crime, fully prepared for the consequences, for they see themselves as martyrs to whom the gates of heaven are immediately open. The consequences are bound to be terrible now that the might and wrath of the United States is roused by this second Day of Infamy.

The people who perpetrated this unspeakable outrage, this massacre of innocents, are the enemies of civilisation. There is no alternative but to fight them. But if and when the fight is over, the millions of Moslems who see themselves as victims will remain.

It is right for us to feel horror and rage. Now is not the time to say this – but unless a way is found of solving the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, the horrors will go on.

I’m watching this MSNBC rebroadcast of the 9/11 attack coverage. In one pretty jarring moment, Katie Couric cuts away to images of Palestinians cheering in the street, handing out candy and literally jumping for joy over the news that the World Trade Center was destroyed and then-untold thousands of Americans killed. Couric tried to provide context by explaining that the “U.S. government” is increasingly unpopular in the Palestinian territories. She repeatedly emphasized “the U.S. government.” Okay, fair enough. And if memory serves she wasn’t nearly as bad as Peter Jennings was in apologizing for Palestinian glee over American deaths. But Couric’s emphasis on the American government seemed to gloss over the fact that these joyful Palestinians weren’t celebrating an attack on the government but upon the American people. It is a cliche when making allowances for Arab anti-Americanism to say “they” don’t hate the American people, just American policies. It’s worth keeping in mind, that when put to the test, this distinction often evaporates amidst all of the celebrations over spilled American blood.

Palestinians go into the streets, dancing and shooting in the air and handing out sweets, to celebrate the news of the terrorist attack in the U.S.Attacks celebrated in West BankThe Times, UKTuesday, September 11, 2001

Thousands of Palestinians celebrated today’s terror attacks in the United States, chanting “God is Great” and distributing sweets to passers-by, even as their leader, Yassir Arafat, said he was horrified.

The US Government has become increasingly unpopular in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the past year, with many Palestinians accusing Washington of siding with Israel.

In the West Bank town of Nablus, about 3,000 people poured into the street shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the government targets in Washington.

Demonstrators distributed sweets in a traditional gesture of celebration. Several Palestinian gunmen shot in the air, while other marchers carried Palestinian flags. Nawal Abdel Fatah, 48, wearing a long black dress, threw sweets in the air, saying she was happy because “America is the head of the snake, America always stands by Israel in its war against us”.

—

Palestinians in Lebanon Celebrate Anti-US Attacks

Sept. 11, 2001

Ain-al-Helweh, Lebanon (AFP) – Dozens of Palestinian refugees today fired into the air with joy at news of apparent anti-US terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, AFP correspondents witnessed.

Guerillas in military fatigues from various factions fired assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades into the air in the Ain al-Helweh refugee camp at the outskirts of the southern port city of Sidon, one correspondent said.

Camp residents, some still in pyjamas, interrupted afternoon rest to rush down to the streets and fire assault rifles into the air, they said.

At the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Palestinian fighters also went out to the streets as soon as they heard the news from their television sets to fire into the air with joy, an AFP correspondent said.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority try to suppress this news with death threats to journalists who captured the celebrations on film!!!AP protests threats to freelance camerman who filmed Palestinian rally

Sept. 12, 2001

JERUSALEM (AP) The Associated Press on Wednesday protested to the Palestinian Authority about threats against a freelance camerman who filmed Palestinians celebrating terror attacks in the United States.

The videographer, on assignment for Associated Press Television News, was summoned to a Palestinian Authority security office and told that the material must not be aired. Calls in the name of the Tanzim militia, an armed group associated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group, warned him he would be held responsible and made what he interpreted as threats on his life.

Several Palestinian Authority officials spoke to AP in Jerusalem urging that the material not be broadcast. Ahmed Abdel Rahman, Arafat’s Cabinet secretary, said the Palestinian Authority “cannot guarantee the life” of the cameraman if the footage was broadcast.

The cameraman then requested that the material not be aired. In light of the danger, APTN has not released the footage of the rally in Nablus.

AP news stories reported worldwide on the demonstration in Nablus and AP distributed still pictures and video of similar rallies in east Jerusalem, Lebanon and elsewhere. An AP still photographer did not take pictures of the Nablus rally after being warned at the scene not to do so.

The protest by AP Chief of Bureau Dan Perry said, “I ask the assurances of the Palestinian Authority that you will protect our journalists from threats and attempts at intimidation and that no harm would come to our freelance cameraman from distribution of the film.”

—

Foreign journalists ‘deeply concerned’ by PA harassment

September 13, 2001

Foreign journalists based in Israel have condemned the Palestinian Authority’s harassment of journalists and its suppression of videotape made of Palestinian celebrations in the wake of the terror attacks in the United States this week.

The Foreign Press Association in Israel released the following statement relating to this incident:

“The FPA expresses deep concern over the harassment of journalists by the Palestinian Authority as police forces and armed gunmen tried to prevent photo and video coverage of Tuesday’s rally in Nablus where hundreds of Palestinians celebrated the terror attacks in NY and Washington.

“We strongly condemn the direct threats made against local videographers by local militia members and the attitude of Palestinian officials who made no effort to counter the threats, control the situation, or to guarantee the safety of the journalists and the freedom of the press.

“We call on the PA to ensure freedom of the press and the free flow of information and to prevent elements operating within PA jurisdiction from making or carrying out threats that aim to impede this and effectively impose censorship. We hold the PA fully responsible for the safety of each and every journalist operating within their areas, especially those who were filming and covering Tuesday’s events in Nablus.”

Israel claims the Palestinian photographer who shot the film and passed it on to The Associated Press received death threats.

Ra’anan Gissin, a senior aide to Sharon, called the incident “journalism under terror.”

The Associated Press yesterday refused to comment on reports that it had refrained from broadcasting the film following pressure from the Palestinian Authority.

—

Bin-Laden Poster Seen at Gaza Rally

The Associated PressFriday, Sept. 14, 2001; 6:09 p.m. EDT

JERUSALEM — About 1,500 Palestinians, many supporters of the Islamic militant group Hamas, marched in a Gaza Strip refugee camp on Friday, burning Israeli flags and carrying a large poster of Osama bin Laden, who has been named as a key suspect in this week’s terror attacks in the United States.

After the rally, plainclothes Palestinian policemen questioned several journalists, including staffers of foreign news agencies, and confiscated videotape and film as well as camera equipment. An Associated Press Television News video was among the materials taken, and an AP photographer was warned by officials not to publish pictures of the bin-Laden poster.

AP protested and demanded return of the video and other material.

The journalists were told police would review the material before deciding whether to release it.

Officials of Yasser Arafat’s self-rule government refused to comment on the record and did not respond immediately to AP’s protest.

The Palestinian police said in a statement that the rally in the Nusseirat refugee camp took place without a permit. “The Palestinian police confiscated media material which documented illegal acts,” the statement said.

The Palestinian Authority has sought to prevent coverage of demonstrations in support of those who carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

Earlier this week, Palestinian police stopped camera teams and photographers from covering a rally in the West Bank town of Nablus in which several thousand Palestinians celebrated the attacks in the United States. Palestinian officials said the demonstration did not represent widespread Palestinian opinion.

Friday’s march in the Nusseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip was led by supporters of Hamas, a militant group that has claimed responsibility for suicide attacks against Israel. Demonstrators burned several Israeli flags and effigies of Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

A large Osama bin Laden painting was carried by two men in the crowd. Bin Laden, an exiled Saudi millionaire, has been named by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell as a key suspect in Tuesday’s terror attacks.

CNN’s clip showing Palestinians dancing in the streets was challenged as being archival footage, years old. But the footage was authentic. There was also Arab and Pakistani coverage of gloating, and the Lebanese press carried many…

After a national tragedy, Americans often observe an informal period of mourning during which both serious investigations of the causes of the event and the sadly inevitable jokes about it are silenced. The usual polite response is that either analysis or humor is “too soon.”

Coming nearly 10 years after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Discovery’s series of documentaries “Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero” should be comforting to all viewers who still feel the need for consolation or closure. The episode provided for review is moving, informative and well structured.

But the very fact that the documentarians seem to feel the need to console us suggests that it’s still too soon for a mainstream documentary about the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site. In reverential tones, the episode portrays nearly everyone involved in the process as a secular saint. Anything that might darken that portrait is ignored.

Airing in two commercial-free blocks on Thursday, Aug. 25, and Thursday, Sept. 1, from 8 to 11 p.m., the series consists of six episodes. The one provided for review, airing this week at 10, covers the construction and curating of the National September 11 Museum.

The most moving part of the hour is the stories of people with a personal connection to the attacks. The brother of Abe Zelmanowitz, a computer programmer who died when he chose to stay at the side of a colleague and friend in a wheelchair, donates Abe’s faded ID card to the museum.

Lee Ielpi, a New York firefighter whose son Jonathan, also a firefighter, died in the towers, recounts how the sight of the few remaining “tridents” from the buildings’ framework inspired him as he searched the rubble for his son’s remains, which weren’t found for three months. Two of the tridents will be the centerpiece of the museum.

The stories of some of the artifacts that will be on display are affecting. A crushed fire engine was found parked near the site; all the men who rode there on the truck died when the towers collapsed. We hear the recording of the last message the crew’s captain left as he and his men ascended the staircase.

The curators and architects come across as idealists who are genuinely committed to making the museum an appropriate place for remembrance and thought.

But some of the talk about the design elements sounds as if the architects were still trying to sell their concept. The stripes in the semi-reflective glass, made of tiny ceramic rectangles, are meant to echo the stripes of the Twin Towers, even though they’re more horizontal than vertical. The fact that people approaching the building can both see their own reflection and see inside – a property the building’s panels share with most windows and storm doors – is supposed to be significant.

A criticism like that would be simply be out of place in this documentary. The site is repeatedly referred to as “sacred.” A graphic at the beginning says the episode is “dedicated to the heroes transforming Ground Zero.”

“Hero” sounds right when it refers to Abe Zelmanowitz or Jonathan Ielpi. It sounds a little stretched when used to describe a union ironworker or the museum’s lighting director.

If we’re watching heroes working on sacred ground, it’s downright blasphemous to question the motives or behavior of anyone involved. But the process of designing and building the museum, the memorial and the surrounding skyscrapers at Ground Zero has been marked by bitter battles among the various private and governmental bodies involved, as well as the victims’ families.

The delays and cost overruns have been extreme, even by the standards of New York public construction.

On Jan. 17, 2005, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón indicted eight people on suspicion of providing material support to Sept. 11 planner Ramzi bin al-Shibh and other Al Qaeda members tied to the attack. The indictment named Reda Zerroug, Redouane Zenimi, Samir Mahdjoub, Mohamed Ayat, Hedi Ben Youssef Boudhiba, Khaled Madani, Tahar Ezirouali and Francisco Garcia Gomez. Madani is suspected of possibly giving passports to bin al-Shibh as well as receiving money from another member of the Hamburg cell tied to the Sept. 11 attacks. The suspects were also said to be linked to Ansar al-Islam and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq.

The revelation that a group of potential 9/11 plotters came from Qatar will come as a blow to the country’s wealthy royal rulers, who have been at pains to portray the oil-rich emirate as a beacon of stability and moderation in a volatile region.

By Matthew Moore

7:00AM GMT 02 Feb 2011

While near-neighbours Saudi Arabia and Yemen have struggled to keep a lid on Islamic extremists, Qatar – a British protectorate until 1971 – has experienced little domestic terrorism.

Under the absolute rule of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the country has embraced modernity and sought to exploit its vast oil and gas reserves to become a major commercial power – a policy rewarded last year when it was awarded the 2022 World Cup.

Fifa’s decision may have raised eyebrows in Europe – Qatar has little sporting pedigree and a population of just 1.7 million – but it reflected the emirate’s increasing international prominence.

Last year the Emir and one of his three wives enjoyed a three day state visit to London arranged to recognise Qatar’s strong trade links with Britain. The Qatari royal family bought the Harrods for £1.5bn last May and are behind the controversial redevelopment of the Chelsea Barracks.

Qatar also has strong relations with Washington. In 2002 the US military transferred its central command from Saudi Arabia to a base outside Doha, from where generals directed the invasion of Iraq.

As president of the Arab League, Qatar took a lead in attempting to persuade Scotland to release the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

By the standards of the Arabian Peninsula, the emirate’s record on freedom of speech is strong. Al-Jazeera, the twenty four hour news network, was established with a grant from the Emir and has its headquarters in Doha.

But the rarity of terrorist attacks in Qatar has raised concerns about complacency, in a country where most people belong to the Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam which has been adopted by many extremists.

In diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks US officials described the state as the “worst in the region” on counterterrorism, noting that security services were reluctant to crack down on Islamists for fear of being seen as too pro-American.

The United States is conducting a manhunt for a previously unknown group believed to be involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks, according to a US cable published in Wednesday’s Telegraph newspaper.

In the memo, leaked by the WikiLeaks website, a US official in Qatar told the Department for Homeland Security in Washington that three Qatari men were under suspicion of conducting surveillance operations on the attack sites.

The team, who flew from the US to London a day before the attacks, aroused suspicion after refusing to allow cleaners into their Los Angeles hotel room which staff earlier noted contained several “pilot type uniforms.”

Two defectors from Iran’s intelligence service have testified that Iranian officials had “foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks,” according to a court filing Thursday in a federal lawsuit in Manhattan that seeks damages for Iran’s “direct support for, and sponsorship of, the most deadly act of terrorism in American history.”

[Imad Mugniyah, the Hezbollah leader killed in 2008, also was accused of a role in 9/11].

One of the defectors also claimed that Iran was involved in planning the attacks, the filing said. The defectors’ identities and testimony were not revealed in the filing but were being submitted to a judge under seal, said lawyers who brought the original suit against Iran on behalf of families of dozens of 9/11 victims.

The suit’s allegation that Iran had foreknowledge of the attacks is hard to assess fully, given that the defectors’ testimony is being filed under seal.

The suit contends that Iran and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant organization with close ties to Tehran, helped Al Qaeda in planning the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and in facilitating the hijackers’ training and travel. After the attacks, the suit contends, Iran and Hezbollah helped Qaeda operatives escape, providing some with a safe haven in Iran…

Iran should pay damages, 9/11 family members say
May 21, 2011 Associated Press

NEW YORK — Lawyers representing 9/11 families are asking a federal judge to find Iran culpable in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, saying new evidence shows Iranian officials had advanced word of the attacks and helped train the hijackers.

The lawyers filed papers Thursday in US District Court in Manhattan saying there is “clear and convincing” evidence to conclude default judgment damages should be paid to their plaintiffs — families and personal representatives of some of those killed in the attacks…

Lawyers for seven family members of Philadelphia-area victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks filed new documents Thursday in long-running litigation that they say provide clear evidence the government of Iran aided the hijackers.

Included in the court filings are affidavits from 9/11 Commission staff members alleging that the Iran government directly aided the attack by facilitating the movement of 9/11 hijacking team members through Iran.

The 9/11 Commission, in its June 16, 2004, report, said that senior al-Qaeda operatives had long maintained contact with Iranian intelligence officials and that there was “strong evidence” that Iranian border officials had facilitated their passage through the country on their way to Afghanistan. The commission said there was evidence that Iranian government officials had agreed not to stamp the passports of traveling al-Qaeda operatives.

They would have been barred from the United States had their documents shown travel in Iran, which the U.S. government had designated as a state supporter of terrorism. Despite those findings, the commission stopped short of directly implicating Iran and its proxy in southern Lebanon, the militant group Hezbollah, long linked with terrorist attacks around the world, in the attacks.

“Developing evidence of Iran’s involvement with al-Qaeda regarding the events of 9/11 is like putting together a large jigsaw puzzle where many of the parts are missing and never will be found,” said the plaintiffs’ lawyer Thomas E. Mellon Jr. of Doylestown.

But, he added, “over the last nine years, after interviewing dozens of people, reviewing hundreds of documents, and consulting with many experts in the field, we have developed a strong evidentiary case of Iran’s involvement.”

The lawsuit was filed in 2002 in federal District Court in Manhattan. Among the plaintiffs are Ellen Saracini of Bucks County, wife of Victor Saracini, captain of United Flight 175, the second aircraft to hit the World Trade Center, and Fiona Havlish, formerly of Bucks County and now of Boulder, Colo., whose husband also died in the attacks.

Mellon cites affidavits from Janice L. Kephart, a former counsel to the 9/11 Commission who focused on the ways the hijackers evaded border security, and former federal prosecutor Dietrich Snell, also a former 9/11 staff lawyer.

ONE year ago, the world witnessed a unique kind of broadcasting – the mass murder of thousands, live on television. As a lesson in the pitiless cruelty of the human race, September 11 was up there with Pol Pot’s mountain of skulls in Cambodia, or the skeletal bodies stacked like garbage in the Nazi concentration camps. An unspeakable act so cruel, so calculated and so utterly merciless that surely the world could agree on one thing – nobody deserves this fate. Surely there could be consensus: the victims were truly innocent, the perpetrators truly evil. But to the world’s eternal shame, 9/11 is increasingly seen as America’s comeuppance. Incredibly, anti-Americanism has increased over the last year. There has always been a simmering resentment to the USA in this country – too loud, too rich, too full of themselves and so much happier than Europeans – but it has become an epidemic. And it seems incredible to me. More than that, it turns my stomach.

America is this country’s greatest friend and our staunchest ally. We are bonded to the US by culture, language and blood. A little over half a century ago, around half a million Americans died for our freedoms, as well as their own. Have we forgotten so soon? And exactly a year ago, thousands of ordinary men, women and children – not just Americans, but from dozens of countries – were butchered by a small group of religious fanatics. Are we so quick to betray them? What touched the heart about those who died in the twin towers and on the planes was that we recognised them. Young fathers and mothers, somebody’s son and somebody’s daughter, husbands and wives. And children. Some unborn. And these people brought it on themselves? And their nation is to blame for their meticulously planned slaughter? These days you don’t have to be some dust-encrusted nut job in Kabul or Karachi or Finsbury Park to see America as the Great Satan. The anti-American alliance is made up of self-loathing liberals who blame the Americans for every ill in the Third World, and conservatives suffering from power-envy, bitter that the world’s only superpower can do what it likes without having to ask permission. The truth is that America has behaved with enormous restraint since September 11. Remember, remember. Remember the gut-wrenching tapes of weeping men phoning their wives to say, “I love you,” before they were burned alive. Remember those people leaping to their deaths from the top of burning skyscrapers. Remember the hundreds of firemen buried alive. Remember the smiling face of that beautiful little girl who was on one of the planes with her mum. Remember, remember – and realise that America has never retaliated for 9/11 in anything like the way it could have. So a few al-Qaeda tourists got locked without a trial in Camp X-ray? Pass the Kleenex. So some Afghan wedding receptions were shot up after they merrily fired their semi-automatics in a sky full of American planes? A shame, but maybe next time they should stick to confetti. AMERICA could have turned a large chunk of the world into a parking lot. That it didn’t is a sign of strength. American voices are already being raised against attacking Iraq – that’s what a democracy is for. How many in the Islamic world will have a minute’s silence for the slaughtered innocents of 9/11? How many Islamic leaders will have the guts to say that the mass murder of 9/11 was an abomination? When the news of 9/11 broke on the West Bank, those freedom-loving Palestinians were dancing in the street. America watched all of that – and didn’t push the button. We should thank the stars that America is the most powerful nation in the world. I still find it incredible that 9/11 did not provoke all-out war. Not a “war on terrorism”. A real war. The fundamentalist dudes are talking about “opening the gates of hell”, if America attacks Iraq. Well, America could have opened the gates of hell like you wouldn’t believe. The US is the most militarily powerful nation that ever strode the face of the earth. The campaign in Afghanistan may have been less than perfect and the planned war on Iraq may be misconceived. But don’t blame America for not bringing peace and light to these wretched countries. How many democracies are there in the Middle East, or in the Muslim world? You can count them on the fingers of one hand – assuming you haven’t had any chopped off for minor shoplifting. I love America, yet America is hated. I guess that makes me Bush’s poodle. But I would rather be a dog in New York City than a Prince in Riyadh. Above all, America is hated because it is what every country wants to be – rich, free, strong, open, optimistic. Not ground down by the past, or religion, or some caste system. America is the best friend this country ever had and we should start remembering that. Or do you really think the USA is the root of all evil? Tell it to the loved ones of the men and women who leaped to their death from the burning towers. Tell it to the nursing mothers whose husbands died on one of the hijacked planes, or were ripped apart in a collapsing skyscraper. And tell it to the hundreds of young widows whose husbands worked for the New York Fire Department. To our shame, George Bush gets a worse press than Saddam Hussein. Once we were told that Saddam gassed the Kurds, tortured his own people and set up rape-camps in Kuwait. Now we are told he likes Quality Street. Save me the orange centre, oh mighty one! Remember, remember, September 11. One of the greatest atrocities in human history was committed against America. No, do more than remember. Never forget. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/columnists/parsons/2002/09/11/shame-on-you-american-hating-liberals-115875-12188969/

Infiltration: how Muslim spies and subversives have penetrated Washington (Google eBook) – Pages 45-46Paul E. Sperry – [Thomas Nelson Inc] 2005 – 360 pages – Preview Islam’s apologists allege that Muslims are baffled by Bin Laden’s holy war, He is “a man, who to the dismay of millions of Muslims around the world, uses the Quran to justify his call to arms against the United States,” claims CNN’s Amanpour.In fact, devout Muslims around the world the world who have dutifully read their Quran know bin Laden is a “lion of Allah,” as they say. That is why so many of them in Pakistan and throughout Asia and the Middle East have named their newborn boys after Osama”the warrior.” Like it or not, many Muslims look upon 9/11 as a miracle of faith and bin Laden as a blessed servant with divine protection. Calling on Allah, he was able to hobble the Great Satan in the course of breakfastand live to brag about it, going on four years now, while threatening to do it again! We see a murderer, while they see a holy manand a hero. They call him a terrorist, but in reality he is a true Muslim hero who deserves [P. 46] to be backed by all Muslims throughout the world,” says Saudi businessman Saad al-Shahrani. Prominent Saudi clerics like Suleiman Alwan praised bin Laden in sermons after 9/11, ssaying what he did was jihad, and that those killed were not innocent. Nearly two-thirds of Pakistanis, meanwhile, hold bin Laden in high regard, according to a Pew Research Center poll taken last year. And nearly half say suicide attacks against Americans and other Westerners are justified. He even has fans in South Africa. “Bin Laden is a hero,” agrees Muslim activist Moain Achmad, who sells T-shirts in Cape Town glrifying the U.S. enemy No. 1. The front of his shirts read: “Long Live Bin Laden.”The admiration is not limited to Muslims abroad or ultra-orthodox Muslims. Bin Laden represents what most devout Muslims stand for in their faith, say US intelligence officials, while not necessarily what they are willing to exercise. “Even among the more moderate elements [of the Muslim community], I think you will find sympathy for what he stands for, and what he’s trying to do. Maybe not his tactics, but certainly for his vision of unifying all Muslims under one caliphate,” or global Islamic theocracy, says a CIA officer, who last year testified anonymously as “Dr. K” before the 9/11 Commission. “I think you probably have a great deal of support for that vision.” The reason so many Muslim leaders even in America have not done a better job of denouncing the distortions” in bin Laden’s interpretation of their shared faith is because they are not altogether distortions. And like bin Laden, they believe America is “on the side of injustice,” as Siddiqi said before 9/11, and derseves Allah’s “wrath.” And listen to the head of the National Association of Muslim Chaplains in America. “Osama bin Laden probably will go down in history as a hero to Muslims,” says Warith Deen Umar, former chief Muslim chaplain for New York state prisons. “You will probably find peoplenot just in prisonswho cheered” the 9/11 attacks , says Deen, who himself defends the attacks as scriptural. “You will find people all over the world who cheered at the black eye that America got.” Muslims who have read their Quran now that bin Laden has not strayed from its teaching but has fought in the path of Allah. “So many times I have been asked if Osama bin Laden is a Muslim, and I have refused to go for the easy option,” says Farid Esack, author of Quran, Liberation and Pluralism. “Appending a kaffir label to Osama will only allow me to walk away comfortable in my lies that there is nothing in my sacred text that inspires him, that my theology is not filled with well-documented argument for his terror, and that the vast majority of Muslims in the world do not support him and al-Qaida. http://books.google.com/books?id=Dw1mHo6zjKwC&pg=PA45

Terror on the Internet: the new arena, the new challenges – Page 72 Gabriel Weimann – 2006 – 309 pages – PreviewAlthough the text claims that Muslims could not have been behind the 9/11 attacks, it then praises the hijackers: “For them [non-Muslims], attacks such as the September 1 1th Hijackings is a viable option in Jihad, http://books.google.com/books?id=19iCbNOoYmIC&pg=PA72

BARTENDER: Lizsa Lehman | HeraldTribune.com“I remember thinking that Mohamed was capable of everything they had said was done.” By Heather Allen Published: Sunday, September 10, 2006 at 5:43 a.m. Last Modified: Sunday, September 10, 2006 at 2:44 p.m. When Lizsa Lehman saw the 19 mugshots of the 9/11 terrorists displayed prominently in the newspaper, she found two familiar faces starring back at her — Marwan al-Shehhi and Mohamed Atta. She got to know them both when they bellied up to her bar at the Outlook in Venice after their flying lessons a few miles away. They were dressed well. They were well spoken. And al-Shehhi, was one of the bartender’s favorite patrons. Lehman said he was always striking up conversations. She remembers him laughing, often. But to this day, the mere thought of Atta — his face, his cold stare, his voice — brings goosebumps to her arms and tears to her eyes. “The look on his face was very true to his everyday actions,” said Lehman, describing Atta as unfriendly and cold. The hardened expression in Atta’s picture never left his face, she said. Al-Shehhi was different. “I, to this day, have trouble seeing (him) doing it,” she said. Describing him as jolly, Lehman wants to believe that the round man with glasses had to be coaxed into piloting a plane that crashed into the World Trade Center. “Marwan would talk to you; he enjoyed being in the bar,” she said. “He enjoyed company.” The polar opposite of al-Shehhi, she said, Atta never engaged in conversation with the bartenders because they were all women. “He didn’t like the fact that women were behind the bar,” she said. “It was almost like (he) was offended that we would stand and talk to them.” Seeing his face in the newspaper, Lehman knew. “I remember thinking that Mohamed was capable of everything they had said was done,” she said. http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060910/NEWS/609101202/1007/BUSINESS

America confronts terrorism: understanding the danger and how to think about it : a documentary record, John PradosIvan R. Dee: 2002 Page 9 Mohammed Atta, the man with the liquor bill, was the leader of the September 11 plot. He had gone to flight school in Florida instructors found him humorless and he bragged about being a pilot in that argument at the bar. … http://books.google.com/books?&id=OW3oAAAAIAAJ&dq=atta

Encyclopedia of modern worldwide extremists and extremist groups – Page 29Stephen E. Atkins – 2004 – 404 pages – PreviewAtta had two successful sisters, one a medical doctor and the other a zoologist, but he was always puritanical and authoritarian in his views about women. His attitude was that women and sex were polluting, and he would not allow them to distract him from the path of righteousness… http://books.google.com/books?id=b8k4rEPvq_8C&pg=PA29

USATODAY.com – Manager: Men spewed anti-American sentiments09/14/2001 – Updated 08:02 AM ETManager: Men spewed anti-American sentimentsMIAMI (AP) The night before terrorists struck New York and Washington, three men spewed anti-American sentiments in a bar and talked of impending bloodshed, according to a strip club manager interviewed by the FBI. John Kap, manager of the Pink Pony and Red Eyed Jack’s Sports Bar in Daytona Beach, said the men made the claims to a bartender and a patron. “They were talking about what a bad place America is. They said ‘Wait ’til tomorrow. America is going to see bloodshed,”‘ Kap said. He said he told FBI investigators the men in his bar spent $200 to $300 apiece on lap dances and drinks, paying with credit cards. Kap said he gave the FBI credit card receipts and a business card left by one man and a copy of the Quran that was left at the bar. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/14/miami-club.htm

Focus On Florida – CBS News

MIAMI, Sept. 14, 2001 Focus On Florida

Customers Allegedly Said: ‘America Is Going To See Bloodshed’

(AP) Three men spewed anti-American sentiments in a bar and talked of impending bloodshed the night before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, a Daytona Beach strip club manager interviewed by the FBI said Thursday.

“They were talking about what a bad place America is. They said ‘Wait ’til tomorrow. America is going to see bloodshed,“‘ said John Kap, manager of the Pink Pony and Red Eyed Jack’s Sports Bar. Kap said they made the claims to a bartender and a patron.

Federal agents were investigating on several fronts in Florida on Thursday after searching homes and rental car documents and poring over flight school student records across the state.

The Boston Globe reported on its web site Thursday that it had obtained a copy of the complete manifest list of the planes hijacked from Boston.

The Globe said according to the manifest, Mohamed Atta, one of the suspected terrorists, was assigned seat 8D in business class on American Airlines Flight 11, directly across the aisle from Hollywood producer David Angell and his wife, Lynn, who were in seats 8A and 8B, respectively. Seated next to Atta in seat 8G was Abdul Alomari. FBI investigators have searched Alomari’s home in Vero Beach.

The Globe reported the passenger list for United Air Lines Flight 175 shows that Marwan Alshehri got on the plane that left Boston and slammed into one of the Manhattan skyscrapers 15 minutes after Flight 11. An FAA pilot directory information spelled his name Marwan Alshehhi.

In Daytona Beach, Kap said he told FBI investigators the men in his bar spent $200 to $300 apiece on lap dances and drinks, paying with credit cards. Kap said he gave the FBI credit card receipts, photocopied driver’s licenses, a business card left by one man and a copy of the Quran – the sacred book of Islam – that was left at the bar.

The FBI asked him not to reveal the men’s names publicly, Kap said. He said they lived in three central Florida communities between Daytona Beach and Orlando. FBI Miami spokeswoman Judy Orihuela did not immediately return a phone call.

While investigators pieced together evidence, two former Florida flight school students were identified by German authorities as terrorists aboard the two planes that smashed into the World Trade Center.

Hamburg investigators said Atta, 33, and Alshehhi, 23, had studied at the Technical University in Hamburg and were from the United Arab Emirates. Both men received pilot training at Huffman Aviation, a flight school in Venice, Fla., where FBI investigators are examining student records.

FBI investigators learned that Atta and Alshehhi also took two three-hour courses at SimCenter Inc. in Opa-locka, said Brian George, son of flight school owner Henry George.

“We were completely stunned and shocked,” Brian George said Thursday. “My father said that if he didn’t have a family to support he would stop teaching tomorrow. To think that someone would take what he taught them and turn it into a weapon”

Both men trained on a Boeing 727 full-motion simulator, he said.

FBI and local law enforcement investigators combed a room at the Panther Motel and Apartments in Deerfield Beach for clues related to the attacks.

Manager Richard Surma said the FBI had been collecting evidence in the room rented by two men about two weeks ago since Wednesday. Surma said the FBI told him it was a “national security thing.”

The FBI issued a bulletin for authorities to look out for a silver 1996 Chrysler Plymouth and its possible driver Amer Kamfar, a flight engineer who listed a Saudi Airlines post office box as his address in FAA records and lived in Vero Beach, about 70 miles north of West Palm Beach.

Agents were questioning Saudi flight engineer Adnan Bukhari, 41, whom a county sheriff’s official said was cooperating with FBI inquiries. Bukhari was a student at Flight Safety, which trains commercial jet crews.

Agents searched four Vero Beach homes, including Bukhari’s and the house next door, where another Flight Safety student, Alomari, lived with his wife and four children.

An apparent relative of Bukhari, Ameer Bukhari, was a student pilot at Flight Safety Academy when he was killed in a mid-air collision exactly a year before Tuesday’s attack.

Kamfar, 41, was listed as living at the same address as Alomari at different times. He previously was issued a driver’s license in Venice, Calif.

Landlord Lonny Mixel said Thursday that Alomari arrived in July 2000 and told him he was a commercial pilot from Saudi Arabia and was in Vero Beach to attend Flight Safety Academy. Alomari said he would be out of the house by the end of August. Then he pushed the date back until Sept. 3 and moved out that day.

FBI agents were also interviewing three Saudi flight engineers who are taking classes at Flight Safety Academy, company spokesman Roger Ritchie said Thursday.

The school does not have simulators for Boeing 767 and 757 aircraft such as the ones involved in Tuesday’s attacks, Ritchie said.

Thomas Quinn, a New York-based spokesman for Saudi Arabian Airlines, said many of the airline’s pilots came to the United States for flight training. Foreign students must be sponsored by an airline to attend Flight Safety.

The newspaper said Al Shehri was listed as a passenger on the American Airlines flight from Boston and had earned a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical science, the university’s commercial pilot training degree, and is listed as having a commercial pilot’s license.

Seedy secrets of hijackers who broke Muslim lawsBy Toby Harnden 12:01AM BST 06 Oct 2001THE leader of the September 11 terrorists and four other hijackers made several trips to Las Vegas over the summer to hold meetings, gamble and be entertained by topless dancers.

According to the FBI, Mohamed Atta, the pilot of the first hijacked aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Centre, and his accomplices spent some of their time in Las Vegas at the Olympic Bar, a downtown strip club.

Lotfi Riassi, a pilot arrested in London on suspicion of teaching four hijackers how to fly, also stayed in the gambling city in Nevada. Investigators believe the September 11 plot was developed there.

But the Muslim fundamentalists, who supposedly believed that their terrorism would earn them the pleasures of eager virgins in heaven, also sampled some of the forbidden pleasures of America’s capital of decadence.

Samantha, a 29-year-old stripper, told the San Francisco Chronicle, that she had been paid to lap dance for Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot of the second aircraft to hit the World Trade Centre.

“Some big-man terrorist, huh?”, she said as she took a break at the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret. “He spent about $20 for a quick dance and didn’t tip more.”

She remembered the terrorist staring blankly at her as she swung her hips inches from his face. “I’m glad he’s dead with the rest of them, and I don’t like feeling something like that,” she said. “But he wasn’t just a bad tipper – he killed people.

“Some of the girls here remember a couple of those guys coming in here in August, too. For me, what I remembered most was the guy with the beard. You don’t forget a face in this business.”

All the strippers, she said, remember the men as well-groomed, polite and light drinkers. Some of the hijackers also used the Pink Pony strip joint in Florida.

The FBI has told business owners that in addition to Atta and al-Shehhi, Nawaq Alhamzi, Ziad Jarrahi, and Hani Hanjour all stayed in Las Vegas off and on between May and August. The group included a hijacker from each of the four flights.

Investigators believe that Las Vegas was a convenient city to meet because tourists of all races blend together.

Dr Osama Haikal, president of the board of directors of the Islamic Foundation of Nevada, said: “True Muslims don’t drink, don’t gamble, don’t go to strip clubs. These things are a sin, just like what they did in New York and Washington is a sin.”

THE INVESTIGATION Terrorists partied with hooker at Hub-area hotel by Dave Wedge Wednesday, October 10, 2001 [Boston Herlad] While preparing to unleash their twisted “holy war” on America, some of the suicide hijackers set aside strict religious beliefs to whet their lusty appetites, partying with a high-priced hooker in Hub hotel rooms. A driver for a pair of local escort services told the Herald yesterday that he drove a call girl to the Park Inn in Chestnut Hill on Sept. 9 around 10:30 p.m. where she bedded down with one of the mass murderers. It was her second trip to the terrorist’s room that day. Two of the hijackers aboard Flight 11 that crashed into the World Trade Center – Waleed M. Alshehri and Wail Alshehri – spent Sept. 9 in the Route 9 hotel, sources said. “She went there earlier in the day and then again later in the night,” the driver said of the escort. “She saw just one guy when I drove her over there.” The escort, a white blond woman in her early 20s, had a 20 minute tryst in the hotel room with one of the hijackers. She was paid $180 in cash, the driver said. “She freaked out when she saw his picture on TV,” he said. “She recognized one of the faces.” Managers for the Park Inn did not return phone calls seeking comment. In the days before the attack, the driver brought the same woman to the Days Hotel on Soldiers Field Road in Brighton where some of the hijackers are known to have stayed. The woman, who worked for Broadway International and Day and Night Encounters escort services, told the driver she partied with one of the hijackers at the hotel. Day and Night Encounters advertises escorts “for the most discriminating of gentlemen and their most important occasion.” Representatives for both companies did not return phone calls last night. According to Days Hotel manager Adam Sperling, one of the hijackers was a registered guest at the hotel from Sept. 8 through Sept. 11. Sources told the Herald that more than one of the terrorists stayed there those nights. The FBI confiscated guest records, but there were no traceable phone calls on the hotel bill because they apparently used a calling card to make their calls. Sperling said he had “no knowledge” that the hijackers were visited by call girls in their room. The driver, who was unsure of the names of the hijackers seen by the woman, said he also routinely brought women to a male relative of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. “I drove some of the girls to him,” the driver said, adding that the relative often had friends with him. “They were using them right up until the day (the attacks) happened. He used to see the girls once a week. Now, since the bombings, no calls.” Bin Laden has several relatives in the Boston area, many of whom returned to Saudi Arabia in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks. The FBI has interviewed the driver and the call girl and has seized records from the two escort services, the driver said. The woman, shaken by her sudden involvement in the international probe, has hired a lawyer, he added. Workers at several escort services called by the Herald yesterday reported that they have been questioned by the FBI as to whether any of their women may have been with the hijackers. FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz would not confirm or deny whether any of the hijackers rented hookers in the days before the attacks. She also would not comment on whether agents have questioned workers at the city’s many escort services. The dirty Hub dalliances of the terrorists is just the latest link between the Koran-toting killers and America’s seedy sex scene. In Florida, several of the hijackers – including reputed ringleader Mohamed Atta – spent $200 to $300 each on lap dances in the Pink Pony strip club. The group ran up drink tabs, spewed anti-American sentiments and talked of impending bloodshed a few days before the attacks, according to published reports. The group left behind a copy of the Koran – the Muslim holy book – at the Florida bar. And in Las Vegas, at least six of the hijackers spent time living it up on the Strip on various occasions between May and August. Marwan Al-Shehhi, who was aboard the second plane that slammed into the World Trade Center, frequently got lap dances at the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret where he had a reputation as a lousy tipper, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. FBI agents have also reportedly questioned the owners of Nardone’s Go-Go Bar in Elizabeth, N.J. Several of the terrorists spent time in nearby Paterson and Newark and reportedly patronized the club… http://web.archive.org/web/20011010224657/http://www.bostonherald.com/attack/investigation/ausprob10102001.htm

A Careful Sequence of Mundane Dealings Sows a Day of Bloody Terror for Hijackers [WSJ.com]October 16, 2001

On June 11, Americans were finally turning the page on the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. That morning, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed. Only hours later, Florida real-estate agent Gloria Irish was helping Marwan al-Shehhi and Hamza Alghamdi scout apartments. Mr. al-Shehhi told Mrs. Irish he was visiting the U.S. for pilot training. He and his friend were looking for three-month rentals. She soon found a two-bedroom unit near a local gym, just as Mr. Alghamdi wanted. But to her embarrassment, the owner refused to rent it to him. “I figured it was because of his first and last name,” Mrs. Irish recalls. “I thought, this isn’t any way to show people what Americans are like.” The embarrassment proved only temporary. Within a couple of days, she had found the two visitors apartments in separate Delray Beach country-club communities. The men secured the properties with $6,000 in cash and even walked Mrs. Irish to the bank to deposit it. Those were just two of the countless transactions by which 19 men would turn the commonplace features of 21st century America into instruments of murder on a scale that would dwarf Mr. McVeigh’s savagery. The hijackers preyed precisely on “what Americans are like”: their welcoming borders, their ubiquitous technology, their thriving commerce, their culture of mobility. The hijackers came tantalizingly close on a few occasions to drawing the attention of law-enforcement agencies. But then they slipped through cracks in the system that seemed less obvious before Sept. 11. They often displayed a conspicuous clumsiness. As student pilots, some of them struck instructors as hopelessly incompetent and obstinate. But in the face of obstacles, the plotters showed uncanny persistence. They moved on to other flight schools. They learned what they needed to know. The hijackers often operated in complementary pairs: the jarring brusqueness of one canceled out by the affability of his partner. While apartment hunting, a glowering Mr. Alghamdi never spoke to Mrs. Irish, who concluded he was “a creep.” The genial Mr. al-Shehhi apologized that his friend didn’t speak English. “He was just the friendliest guy,” Mrs. Irish says of Mr. al-Shehhi, who is believed to have piloted the plane that crashed into the World Trade Center’s south tower. He would greet her, she remembers, with a big smile and a warm, “Good morning, Gloria.”

ONE HIJACKER’S BEGINNINGS AS A BOY, Mohamed Atta had a flair for English and chess. The frail, quiet son of a domineering Cairo lawyer traded letters with a pen pal in the U.S., a classmate recalls. Friends called him “Mr. Polite.” Professional achievement, not religion, was a defining theme in the relatively modern Atta family. Mohamed’s father pushed him to match the attainments of his two older sisters, a physician and a professor of immunology. It wasn’t enough that Mohamed earned an architecture degree from Cairo University and landed a job with a local engineering firm, the father, also named Mohamed, says today. He wanted his son to learn German — “the language of engineers,” as the elder Mr. Atta puts it — and earn a doctorate abroad. In 1992, the son arrived in the cold, rainy northern German port of Hamburg, where his father had decided he should study. He passed the entrance exam for the School of Applied Sciences but was told there wasn’t room for him. This, he and his father concluded, was racism. The father wired money to cover the cost of a discrimination lawsuit. According to court records in Hamburg, the suit was eventually dropped, and Mr. Atta was admitted. But by that time, the embittered young man had enrolled instead at Hamburg-Harburg Technical University… There, a former classmate, Volker Hauth, recalls Mr. Atta criticizing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. More vehemently, he railed against the Egyptian government’s oppression of fundamentalist Muslims. His country’s “fat cats” were getting rich at the expense of the poor, he told his classmate. “This hurt Mohamed’s sense of justice,” recalls Mr. Hauth. Even opportunities for the educated Egyptian middle class were drying up in a gasping economy. In contrast to his self-confident, often-angry views about politics, he was awkward around women, former classmates say. In 1994, he fell in love with a Palestinian woman, but his father says he discouraged his son’s talk of marriage. It would be a distraction from his studies, the elder Mr. Atta told his son. The relationship collapsed, leaving the young man distraught, his father recalls. Later, Mohamed told friends the woman had been too modern for his taste. In the mid-1990s, his involvement with Islam deepened, former classmates and his father remember. He grew a traditional beard. He interrupted his graduate studies in 1995 to make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. In 1996, at the age of 27, he made out a will, requesting a strict Muslim funeral. Women, especially pregnant women, and “unclean people” were to be excluded. Mourners were instructed not to cry. Five years later, the document would be found in luggage that never made it onto American Airlines Flight 11, which Mr. Atta is thought to have steered into the World Trade Center’s north tower. Classmates and his father agree that 1996 was a turning point for Mr. Atta. His grievances about his homeland, his heavy-handed father and his romantic failure may have reinforced the appeal of a militant strain of Islam that ascribed much of what was wrong in the Middle East to corrupt, authoritarian governments backed by the U.S. Signaling his deepening devotion, Mr. Atta early in the year sought another pilgrimage to Mecca, this one to the Omrah shrine. Omrah has a reputation for drawing not only pious Muslims but also many militant extremists. On short notice, Mr. Atta implored his father for help with money and arrangements for the trip. By tapping an old client at the Saudi Embassy in Cairo, the elder Mr. Atta obtained travel documents permitting his son to visit in February, for the last 10 days of Ramadan… The younger Mr. Atta didn’t return to Hamburg for 15 months. At some point, a federal law-enforcement official says, he is thought to have visited Afghanistan to train at a bin Laden camp for terrorists. The FBI isn’t saying what evidence it has of this visit. When Mr. Atta returned to Hamburg in 1998, two other suspected members of the Sept. 11 conspiracy — Mr. al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah — were also there. Each of that pair had entered Germany two years earlier, ostensibly to attend college. Mr. al-Shehhi, then 20, was the son of a Muslim prayer leader in the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Jarrah was a 23-year-old born in Lebanon, who grew up dreaming of becoming a pilot. Whatever brought them together, the three Middle Easterners began attending the same Hamburg mosque. So, too, did a Syrian-born trader, Mamoun Darkazanli, who was a business associate of a man indicted by the U.S. in 1998 because of his alleged role as Mr. bin Laden’s finance boss. German police began watching Mr. Darkazanli and another of his friends, who was Mr. Atta’s roommate in a Hamburg apartment where Mr. al-Shehhi would also come to live and Mr. Jarrah was often a visitor. The probe, however, went nowhere. Police saw nothing suspicious in the students’ behavior, nor in Mr. Darkazanli’s. “We didn’t know what we were looking at,” says one German police investigator. He adds that police were hindered by German laws that allow surveillance of only those suspected terrorists planning an attack in Germany. Otherwise, wiretapping and other aggressive investigative action are off-limits. In 1999, Messrs. Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah were joined many nights at the Hamburg apartment by four or five other men, neighbors say. Most of those in attendance wore beards and Middle Eastern robes. They left their shoes neatly lined up outside the door. On bank-transfer slips he used to pay rent, Mr. Atta each month wrote, “dar el anser,” Arabic for “house of the followers.”Mr. Jarrah, for one, maintained at least one secular, personal interest outside the Hamburg circle. He spent time in Bochum, Germany, two hours away, where, according to his uncle, Jamal Jarrah, he shared an apartment with a Turkish girlfriend, Aysel Sengun. She didn’t appear to be a strict Muslim, her former neighbors say. A medical student, Ms. Sengun had long dark hair and favored jeans and heels. She is now in a German witness-protection program. In late 1999, Messrs. Atta, Jarrah and al-Shehhi prepared to move. Within a span of two months, each man separately reported his passport as lost and obtained a new one, German intelligence officials say. That would have allowed them to apply for U.S. visas without revealing past trips to countries that would raise suspicions, such as Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan. In December, Mr. Jarrah told a friend he was leaving to fulfill a dream of studying in the U.S. “He thought America was great,” recalls the friend, Michael Gotzman. Mr. Jarrah promised to keep in touch. But when his friend asked for a U.S. postal or e-mail address, Mr. Jarrah brushed him off.

ROOTS IN THE SOUTHWEST IT ISN’T CLEAR yet whether the Hamburg trio came to the U.S. with a fully-formed plot or devised the hijacking scheme later. Some German federal investigators theorize that key members of the 19 knew the broad outline of the plan. These investigators point out that Mr. al-Shehhi took flight lessons in Bonn in 1999, perhaps in preparation for a hijacking. And at least one other eventual member of the suspected Sept. 11 team had been in the U.S. years earlier, eager to learn to fly airplanes. Beginning in the mid-1980s, a wealthy young businessman named Abdul Hanjour began shuttling between Saudi Arabia and Arizona, where he exported luxury cars and cultivated a wide circle of friends. In 1990, his teenage brother came to visit. Hani Hanjour, then 18, signed up for an eight-week course at the University of Arizona’s Center for English as a Second Language. “He was very, very quiet, very shy and very religious,” says Susan Khalil, a friend of Abdul Hanjour. “Hani seemed awkward socially … a very meek, timid type of person.” He soon returned to the Middle East but in 1996 resurfaced in Ms. Khalil’s life. Abdul Hanjour called from Saudi Arabia and asked Mrs. Khalil and her husband if Hani could come stay with them in Miramar, Fla., where they had relocated. “We said what any friend would say: ‘Of course,’ ” Ms. Khalil recalls. Hani had a goal now: to learn to fly. Ms. Khalil helped him fill out applications to flight schools. After a brief stop at a California pilot academy, he soon returned to Arizona to attend CRM Airline Training in the Phoenix area, according to CRM’s president, Duncan K. M. Hastie. He was reclusive, his English poor. As the months wore on, he didn’t display much aptitude in the cockpit, Mr. Hastie says. But Mr. Hanjour didn’t give up. By 1998, he had approached another Phoenix flight center, the Sawyer School of Aviation, former employees recall. Mr. Hanjour paid $300 to join the “Sim Club,” providing him open access to Sawyer’s flight simulator. The following year, the Sim Club had another member: Lotfi Raissi. British prosecutors late last month accused Mr. Raissi, an Algerian, of having provided pilot training to four of the 19 hijackers. In addition to Mr. Hanjour, Ziad Jarrah also trained on Sawyer’s simulator, says the school’s former chief flight instructor Sylvia Stinson. She and the simulator’s manager at the time, Wes Fults, say they recall Mr. Raissi teaching others, but they don’t remember him with any of the 19. At some point after his simulator work, Mr. Hanjour is believed to have spent time in San Diego, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although the FBI hasn’t been specific as to when he may have been in the area, investigators have linked his movements to those of two others who lived in the city and who would eventually join Mr. Hanjour on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon: Khalid al Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. In December 1999, Mr. al Midhar, a Yemeni citizen, had been videotaped by Malaysian intelligence officials at a meeting with members of Mr. bin Laden’s al Qaeda network in Kuala Lumpur, according to a senior U.S. official. Malaysia shared the surveillance tape with the U.S. But it wasn’t until after the October 2000 suicide-bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen that U.S. intelligence officials began to focus on the videotape, according to Vincent Cannistraro, a private-security consultant who headed counterterrorism efforts for the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s and maintains contacts throughout the Middle East. Besides Mr. al Midhar, U.S. intelligence officials also were interested in Mr. Alhazmi, who may have been in Kuala Lumpur with Mr. al Midhar and was known to have traveled with him on at least one other occasion, Mr. Cannistraro says. Ten months after the Cole attack, on Aug. 21, 2001, Messrs. al Midhar and Alhazmi were finally placed on a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service “watch list” designed to bar the entry of terrorists and criminals. By the time they were put on the watch list in August, both men had come to the U.S., arriving aboard the same flight into Los Angeles International Airport from Hong Kong on Jan. 15, 2000, according to a federal law-enforcement official. Mr. al Midhar later left and re-entered the U.S. in New York in July 2001. The INS watch list has traditionally been used primarily at the U.S. border to block, detain or place under surveillance suspected terrorists or criminals. It typically hasn’t been used to spark efforts to round up suspects who are already in the U.S. Late last summer, when the INS determined from immigration records that Messrs. al Midhar and Alhazmi were already in the country, their names were disseminated to other U.S. agencies. But Jeff Thurman, an agent in the FBI’s San Diego branch, says his office wasn’t even informed of those watch-list names until after the Sept. 11 attacks. An FBI official in Washington says the notice about Messrs. al Midhar and Alhazmi was sent to the FBI field offices in Los Angeles and New York. Messrs. Alhazmi and al Midhar, respectively, had indicated upon entering the country they would be staying separately in hotels in those cities, the FBI official says. Agents checked registries of every hotel in New York and Los Angeles, looking for the pair in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI official says. This official stresses that the bureau didn’t realize at the time that it was looking for participants in an imminent mass-terror assault. Had investigators started looking earlier and more broadly across the country, tracking down the two suspects might well have been possible. Mr. al Midhar was using a credit card in his own name. Mr. Alhazmi, a Saudi native, was listed in the 2000-01 San Diego phone book. They attended the city’s largest mosque, the Islamic Center, in the middle-class Clairemont neighborhood. Like Mr. Hanjour, they sought flight training. And they, too, were weak pilots. At Sorbi’s Flying Club, they told employees they aimed to pilot Boeings. But they made it into the air only twice, in small single-engine planes, before instructor Richard Garza told them to give up. They struck him, Mr. Garza recalls, as “two guys who had probably never opened up the hood of a car.” At one point, when Mr. Alhazmi was practicing, Mr. Garza looked back in the plane to find Mr. al Midhar with his eyes shut, praying softly.

BANK ACCOUNTS, FLYING LESSONS THE HAMBURG TRIO arrived in the U.S. within a month of each other, a federal law-enforcement official says. Mr. al-Shehhi flew into Newark on May 29, 2000. Mr. Atta followed on June 3. On his way over from Germany, he stopped off briefly in Prague and met with at least one Iraqi intelligence agent, says a Czech official familiar with intelligence matters. More isn’t publicly known about that encounter. Mr. Jarrah arrived in Atlanta on a June 27 flight from Munich. Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni citizen and one of Mr. Atta’s Hamburg roommates, had wired $2,200 to a Florida flight-training school and tried to come as well. But in an illustration that immigration procedures can thwart suspected terrorists, Mr. Binalshibh was denied a U.S. visa, according to German federal investigators. The reason for the visa denial couldn’t be determined, but German investigators had previously linked Mr. Binalshibh to the bin Laden network. In the days before Sept. 11, he left Germany for Pakistan, the investigators say. During the 14 months after they arrived in the U.S., Messrs. Atta, al Shehhi and Jarrah lay the logistical foundation for an intricate conspiracy. Mr. Atta is believed to have held the most responsibility. He oversaw arrangements for bank accounts and credit cards, cellphones, identification documents and frequent-flier memberships, according to U.S. investigators and various records. In the spring of 2000, Mr. Atta received $100,000 in wire transfers from a man in the United Arab Emirates who is believed to use the alias “Mustafa Ahmad” and to have arranged the financing for the conspiracy, according to people familiar with the investigation. Transfers of that size don’t necessarily have to be reported to the government by banks and, in and of themselves, wouldn’t be considered suspicious by bankers or regulators, according to U.S. banking and regulatory officials. Additional transfers were made to the plotters from Middle Eastern banks during this period, according to people in the U.S. banking industry. The hijackers, while adroit at times, also had moments of friction with Americans they met. While they tried to learn flying in Florida, Messrs. Atta and al-Shehhi rented a room with two twin beds and a bath at a modest home in the town of Venice. The two student pilots barely acknowledged their landlords, Drucilla Voss and her husband, Charles, a bookkeeper at the Huffman Aviation school, the Vosses say. The pair were sloppy, leaving unmade beds and a lot of water on the bathroom floor. “We’re not a bed-and-breakfast,” Mr. Voss says. “My wife didn’t appreciate it, and I didn’t appreciate it.” After one week, Mr. Voss told his renters to find another place to live. In July, Messrs. Atta and al-Shehhi began a series of 200 lessons at Huffman Aviation that would cost some $20,000. Each time, they paid with a check drawn from a local SunTrust Bank branch, says Huffman owner Rudi Dekkers. Neither man received high marks. That summer, they violated pilot guidelines by abandoning a small Piper Warrior airplane on a runway after it had stalled, Mr. Dekkers says. An instructor at another Florida flight school they attended, Jones Aviation, in Sarasota, asked them to leave after just three weeks, because of their poor attitude, says owner Gary Jones. Flight-school operators generally say there wasn’t anything in the behavior of the eventual hijackers that warranted reporting to authorities. Flight schools cater to a wide range of students, from those aspiring to careers as pilots to weekend fun-seekers. Foreign students are quite common, instructors say. Messrs. Atta and al-Shehhi “were average students — not bad, not good, just average,” says Mr. Dekkers. “But they improved after the first month.” Once they had completed their courses at his flight school, the pair took a standard oral and in-flight test from a Federal Aviation Administration-certified examiner on Dec. 21, 2000. They passed and obtained licenses. Mr. Dekkers adds: “If you come up to my store, and you pay for training, I’ll train you. What can I do?” Messrs. Hanjour and Jarrah also qualified for FAA licenses, according to Landings.com (www.landings.com), a Web site that gets data from the FAA and is considered authoritative. In early 2001, Messrs. Atta and al-Shehhi separately traveled internationally. They returned to Germany in March and cleared out their old Hamburg apartment, German police say. In April, Mr. Atta met three Arabic-speaking men in Hamburg. Karl-Heinz Horst, a German taxi driver who recognized Mr. Atta’s face from television reports after Sept. 11, says he had driven the three passengers about 400 miles, from Furth, in southern Germany, to Hamburg in the north. During the long ride, one of the passengers said in English that he was a war veteran from Afghanistan. Mr. Atta met the taxi in Hamburg and paid the $500 bill in cash, says Mr. Horst. What Messrs. Atta and al-Shehhi were up to in Europe isn’t publicly known. But by spring, the travelers were back in the U.S. to receive a wave of reinforcements. Several of these additional members of the 19-man team arrived on U.S. visas obtained in Saudi Arabia. They came on flights originating from such cities as Zurich and London. All of them needed spending money, places to stay and forms of identification. Florida was the most common destination. In April and May, at least nine bank accounts associated with the hijackers were opened with cash and travelers checks at SunTrust branches, according to people familiar with the situation. The amounts involved were relatively small and didn’t cause bankers or regulators to raise any red flags. In July and August, Mr. Atta repeatedly visited the Shipping Post, a mom-and-pop mailing business in Punta Gorda, Fla., to obtain money orders in amounts of $100 to $200, according to the owner. Mr. Atta, usually neat in pressed khakis and shirt, wasn’t a people person. He sometimes scowled at motel and rental-car clerks. He often traveled with Mr. al-Shehhi and left the public-relations role to his chubby, sociable sidekick. Investigators speculate that the plotters moved around frequently to avoid attracting attention in any one spot. Through the spring and summer, Mr. al-Shehhi made scores of cellphone calls to rental agents, motels, apartments, car-rental desks and the Palm Beach driver’s-license office. On May 25 and 26, for instance, nearly 20 calls were placed from his phone to various real-estate owners and agents in and around Hollywood, Fla. For all the mayhem they would later inflict, some of the men who came to the U.S. for the Sept. 11 plot were hardly robust or physically imposing. In Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Ahmed Alhaznawi joined Ziad Jarrah in the $200-a-week apartment Mr. Jarrah had rented from local resident Charles Lisa. Skinny and frail, Mr. Alhaznawi arrived with an infected gash on his left leg. Mr. Lisa recalls he directed the two men to nearby Holy Cross Hospital for treatment. Many who encountered them now mourn their failure to discern hints of the crime-in-progress. Mr. Lisa says he checked himself into a hospital for several days in September after suffering loss of sleep and high blood pressure. “I still blame myself for not catching at least something that was suspicious,” he says. Like their counterparts in Germany and U.S. federal law enforcement, police in Florida had at least one fleeting opportunity to pick up a member of the Sept. 11 conspiracy. On April 26, in Tamarac, near Fort Lauderdale, Mr. Atta was stopped on the road by Broward County sheriff’s deputies, who were randomly inspecting drivers’ licenses and registration. At the wheel of a red 1986 Pontiac, he had no license and received a citation. Mr. Atta obtained a Florida license a week later but failed to show up for a May 28 court appearance to resolve the citation. As is routine in such instances, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. But as is also routine in most jurisdictions, there isn’t any indication that police tried to find him to enforce the minor charge. Groups of hijackers rendezvoused in several places, including Las Vegas last spring and summer, for what federal law-enforcement officials believe were planning sessions. They also met in cyberspace. Mr. al-Shehhi used a computer in the Delray Beach public library to go online, according to library employees. A senior FBI official says investigators have obtained hundreds of e-mails in English and Arabic, reflecting discussions of the planned Sept. 11 hijackings. Some of the hijackers showed an appetite for Americana. During months spent in Paterson, N.J., Ahmed Alghamdi visited a small grocery store several times a day. Each time, says the grocer, Alfonso Then, the young man bought a half-dozen individually wrapped glazed doughnuts for 25 cents apiece. For much of last summer, a group of four of the hijackers rented scooters by the hour from AAA Car Rental in Ft. Lauderdale. They killed time tooling up and down the city’s famous beaches, much as countless college students do during Spring Break, according to the company’s owners, who ask not to be identified. “For guys that hated America, they sure looked like they were having a great time here,” says one owner. “They didn’t seem to have a care in the world.” The men assumed to have steered the planes on Sept. 11 continued practicing their flying. In August, Messrs. Atta, al-Shehhi, Hanjour and Jarrah flew aircraft in Maryland, Florida and Georgia. On Aug. 19, an instructor at Palm Beach County Airport in Lantana heard Mr. Atta speaking in Arabic over the airplane’s radio. The instructor, who speaks Arabic himself and asks to remain anonymous, believes Mr. Atta intended to turn on the craft’s intercom to talk to his passenger. Instead, Mr. Atta keyed the plane’s radio. He exclaimed, “God is Great!”

IDENTITIES AND PLANE TICKETS AS SUMMER DREW to a close, the conspirators moved toward their points of attack. Some who were bound for American Airlines Flight 77 shifted from California or New Jersey to within easy driving distance of the flight’s point of origin, Washington’s Dulles Airport. One priority was obtaining local government-issued identification, which is least likely to draw attention from airlines. In the Washington area, the plotters tapped into the thriving false-documents market that serves conventional illegal immigrants. On Aug. 1, according to the FBI, Messrs. Hanjour and al Midhar pulled a van into a 7-Eleven parking lot in suburban Falls Church, Va. There, they met Luis Martinez-Flores, himself an illegal immigrant from El Salvador. In return for $100 in cash, withdrawn from an ATM by Mr. al Midhar, Mr. Martinez-Flores rode with the Middle Easterners to a nearby state-government office and signed forms attesting to their permanent residence in Virginia, according to the FBI. That is all that Virginia then required to obtain a state identification card. Messrs. Hanjour and al Midhar were then able the very next day to sign attestation forms for fellow suspected hijackers Majed Moqed and Salem Alhazmi at another government office in Arlington, according to the FBI. Hijackers slated for other flights used the same method. Mr. Martinez-Flores faces federal charges of fraudulently helping several suspected hijackers obtain identification documents. An attorney representing Mr. Martinez-Flores notes that the government hasn’t linked his client to the hijacking plot but otherwise declines to comment. Next, there was a flurry of ticket purchasing, some by means of frequent-flier accounts Mr. Atta and other hijackers set up in late August. Messrs. al Midhar and Alhazmi, the two men who had shown up on the U.S. immigration watch list, signed onto Travelocity.com (www.travelocity.com), an Internet travel site, to order tickets for United Flight 77 from Dulles to Los Angeles, a Travelocity official says. Placing those orders, the pair would have viewed a screen showing a seating diagram of the Boeing jet they would eventually hijack. In Paterson, N.J., Messrs. Moqed and Hanjour went to the ATS travel agency to purchase a seat for Mr. Hanjour on American Airlines Flight 77. But Visa declined to approve the transaction, says an ATS agent who requests anonymity. The pair left, returning later with an envelope stuffed with $1,842 in cash — and got the ticket, says the travel agent. Mr. Moqed, who did the talking for the duo, asked that Mr. Hanjour be seated as far forward as possible. Mr. Hanjour was assigned seat 1B, near the cockpit. That large cash ticket transaction wasn’t the only clue near the end of something peculiar going on. But no one put them together. On Sept. 9, Mr. al-Shehhi and Mohand Al Shehri became the last of at least seven of the hijackers to leave the Panther Motel in Deerfield Beach, Fla. Curious about what the pair had left behind, the proprietor, Richard Surma, dug into his motel’s Dumpster and found a black tote bag containing aeronautical maps of the eastern U.S., a protractor, a German-English dictionary and three martial-arts books. Mr. Surma says he found these items interesting enough to hold onto, but they didn’t seem particularly ominous. Only after Sept. 11 did he realize their potential significance. He called the FBI. Other hijackers displayed a fastidious efficiency as they wrapped up their business. In the last week before the attacks, the FBI says Messrs. Atta, al-Shehhi and Waleed al-Shehri wired some $15,000 in unused funds back to Mustafa Ahmad, the alleged bin Laden paymaster in the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Alhaznawi’s final bank statement, opened after Sept. 11 by his former landlord, showed that he left behind just $14.

ENDGAME A FEW DAYS before Sept. 11, some of the 10 hijackers who would destroy the World Trade Center began casing Logan Airport in Boston. Garage surveillance records obtained by investigators show that a white Mitsubishi sedan rented by one of them moved in and out of the airport’s parking garage at least four times between Sept. 5 and Sept. 11. After the hijackings, the car would be found in a Logan garage. As they prepared to strike, the hijackers split up and stayed in moderately priced hotels in Boston. At around 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 8, Fayez Banihammad, who would join Mr. al-Shehhi on United Flight 175, showed up at the Milner Hotel on the edge of Boston’s downtown theater district. Accompanied by another man, Mr. Banihammad asked a hotel employee to fill out a registration card for him, explaining that his English was poor, the employee says. The next day, Messrs. Atta and al-Shehhi rented the room next to Mr. Banihammad’s. They made a call from their rooms to Western Union, which authorities believe was one final attempt to refund unneeded cash to their contact in the United Arab Emirates. On Monday, Sept. 10, a man resembling the FBI-released photo of United Flight 175 hijacker Hamza Alghamdi checked into the Days Hotel in Boston’s Brighton neighborhood, according to front-desk employee Joe Williams. Mr. Williams signed the guest in as “Ghamdi.” During their stay in the U.S., some of the hijackers had shunned images of American sexuality. Mr. Surma, the Deerfield Beach, Fla., motel owner, says his former guests used towels to cover pictures of women in bathing suits that decorated their rooms. On this night, though, the Days Hotel guest watched a pornographic movie on the in-house video system, according to a law-enforcement official. In New Jersey, meanwhile, a person familiar with the investigation says at least one of the men preparing to hijack United Flight 93 from Newark indulged himself on his final weekend by visiting an exotic-dance club in nearby Elizabeth. Despite the occasional last-minute splurge, the FBI says the hijackers operated on a tight budget in their final days. Receipts investigators found in garbage bins near the conspirators’ Boston hotels showed they often ate pizza or canned food from supermarkets. Cab drivers and waiters remember them as stingy tippers. Mr. Atta left the Milner on Sept. 10 and, with his partner on American Flight 11, Abdulaziz Alomari, headed two hours north to Portland, Maine. They drove a blue Nissan Altima rental car to a Comfort Inn within sight of Portland International Jetport. Surveillance cameras picked them up as they visited a Wal-Mart and a bank’s automated teller machine. As he used the ATM, Mr. Alomari was smiling broadly. Investigators say they don’t know why two of the 10 Boston hijackers drove to Portland a day before the attack, risking a missed connection. Some investigators theorize that the hijackers thought they would attract less suspicion if they originated from separate cities. Others believe Mr. Atta viewed the Portland flight as a final test run for the plan to carry small knives onto planes. The Portland airport’s security checkpoint, which the two men passed through at 5:45 the next morning, was one of the last opportunities for law enforcement to thwart the attack. A security camera snapped their photo, but no one tried to stop the two neatly dressed men with computer bags slung over their shoulders. As the sun rose on a cloudless day in Portland and throughout the Northeast, the pair sat by themselves in the waiting area by Gate 11, leaning forward in their seats and talking quietly, other passengers recall. Walking to his seat on the plane, passenger Vincent Meisner remembers accidentally bumping Mr. Atta with his bag and saying, “Excuse me.” Mr. Atta silently hunched his shoulders and looked away. “I thought he just hadn’t had his morning coffee yet,” Mr. Meisner says. All 10 Boston-departing hijackers reached Logan airport in time. American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 were scheduled to leave for Los Angeles from different terminals, within minutes of each other. Just before passengers boarded the flights, a single cellphone call was placed between the hijack teams, according to investigators. It lasted only a few minutes — long enough, authorities believe, to declare that the operation was on. Mr. Atta’s luggage, which failed to make it onto American Flight 11, was later found to contain a hand-held electronic flight computer, a simulator-procedure manual for Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft and a copy of the Quran. It also held a letter of exhortation for the hijacking. The unidentified author directed readers to sharpen their knife blades for the attacks and to frighten their victims by calling out in Arabic, “God is Great!”Mr. Jarrah, preparing for his own mission in Newark airport, made a final personal gesture that morning. He telephoned his girlfriend in Germany, Aysel Sengul. Mr. Jarrah sounded perfectly normal and said he loved her, Ms. Sengul later told Jamal Jarrah, Ziad’s uncle. When she saw news reports later that day that hijacked planes in America had crashed into the twin towers, the Pentagon and a rural Pennsylvania field, killing thousands, Ms. Sengul became worried, she told Jamal Jarrah. She called her boyfriend’s cellphone. There was no answer…http://web.archive.org/web/20011023132702/http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB1003180286455952120.htm

FBI tracks down the Florida lair of flying school terroristsBy Ian Ball in Miami 12:01AM BST 14 Sep 2001A DETAILED picture of the planning and training for the terrorist attacks by sympathisers of Osama bin Laden has been assembled by the 1,100-strong FBI and police task force in Florida… Mohammed Atta, 33, who almost certainly was the Florida-trained pilot who rammed American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Centre, his cousin Marwan al-Shehhi, 23, and an Arab believed to be a brother of al-Shehhi, appeared to have been in a bibulous celebratory mood last week.Tony Amos, the manager of Shuckums Oyster Bar and Restaurant in Hollywood, just north of Miami, was interviewed by the FBI and he and his barman and a waitress all identified Atta and his cousin as some hard drinkers who propped up the bar last Friday. Atta’s bill for three hours of vodka drinking came to $48 (ֲ£33). When he drunkenly disputed the charge, Mr Amos intervened. “Of course I can pay the bill,” Atta told him. “I’m an airline pilot.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/14/whunt114.xml

Jury spares 9/11 plotter Moussaoui – May 3, 2006 Moussaoui shows no remorse. On the witness stand, Moussaoui displayed a complete lack of remorse for the 9/11 deaths, saying he was sorry only that the attacks weren’t more lethal.“America, you lost,” Moussaoui taunted, clapping his hands as he left the courtroom. “I won.” …http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/05/03/moussaoui.verdict/index.html

Twentieth 9/11 hijacker was radicalised by the ‘daily racism’ he suffered in France, says his mother

By Andy Milne

Last updated at 7:45 PM on 2nd September 2011

The mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only terrorist convicted over 9/11 attacks, says the racism her son suffered in France helped turn him to … Aicha el-Wafi said her son Zacarias Moussaoui was regarded as a ‘dirty Arab’ as a teenager growing up in the city of Narbonne, southern..

Mother of 9/11 conspirator: I was blind to son’s extremism – CNN.com
[September 2, 2011] Mother of only person convicted in U.S. over 9/11 says she was naive; Zacarias Moussaoui was convicted of criminal conspiracy and jailed for …

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11th attacks, a man who called himself a “jackal” and who explained away the 3,000 victims of that day by saying “the language of war is victims.” At least that is what he has told American interrogators, and what he said at a closed hearing in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after being held in secret prisons for close to four years…

ISTANBUL — About a week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared to the United Nations that most people in the world believe the United States was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

To many people in the West, the statement was ludicrous, almost laughable if it weren’t so incendiary. And surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that the U.S. orchestrated the attacks.

However, the belief persists strongly among a minority, even with U.S. allies like Turkey or in the U.S. itself. And it cannot be dismissed because it reflects a gulf in politics and perception, especially between the West and many Muslims.

“That theory might be true,” said Ugur Tezer, a 48-year-old businessman who sells floor tiles in the Turkish capital, Ankara. “When I first heard about the attack I thought, ‘Osama,’ but then I thought the U.S. might have done it to suppress the rise of Muslims.”

Compassion for the United States swept the globe right after the attacks, but conspiracy theories were circulating even then. It wasn’t al-Qaida, they said, but the United States or Israel that downed the towers. Weeks after the strikes, at the United Nations, President George W. Bush urged the world not to tolerate “outrageous conspiracy theories” that deflected blame from the culprits.

However, the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provided fodder for the damning claim that the U.S. killed its own citizens, supposedly to justify military action in the Middle East and to protect Israel. A 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that significant majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey – all among the most moderate nations in the Islamic world – said they did not believe Arabs carried out the attacks.

Two years later, a poll of 17 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.org, an international research project, found majorities in nine of them believed al-Qaida was behind the attacks. However, the U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians.

Such beliefs have currency even in the United States. In 2006, a Scripps Howard poll of 1,010 Americans found 36 percent thought it somewhat or very likely that U.S. officials either participated in the attacks or took no action to stop them.

Those who say the attacks might have been an “inside job” usually share antipathy toward the U.S. government, and often a maverick sensibility. Besides Ahmadinejad, high-profile doubters include Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura has questioned the official account. Conspiracy theorists have heckled former President Bill Clinton and other prominent Americans during speeches.

Controversy over U.S. actions and policies, including the widely discredited assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, reinforced the perceptions of conspiracy theorists. Iranians dug deeper into history, recalling the U.S.-backed coup in their country in 1953.

“Initially, I was doubtful about the conspiracy theories. But after seeing the events in later years, I don’t have any doubt that it was their own operation to find a pretext to hit Muslim countries,” said Shaikh Mushtaq Ahmed, a 58-year-old operations manager in a bank in Pakistan. “It’s not a strange thing that they staged something like this in their own country to achieve a big objective.”

In March, an editorial in The Washington Post harshly criticized Yukihisa Fujita, a lawmaker with the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, for saying in an interview that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers were alive and that shadowy forces with advance information about the plot played the stock market for profit. Fujita said the article contained factual errors.

The record shows that al-Qaida agents on a suicide mission hijacked four American passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people. The evidence is immense: witness accounts, audio recordings, video and photographic documentation, exhaustive investigations and claims of responsibility by al-Qaida.

Yet every fact and official assertion only feeds into alternative views that become amplified on the Internet, some tinged with anti-Semitism because of the close U.S.-Israeli alliance. They theorize that a knowing U.S. government stood by as the plot unfolded, or that controlled demolitions destroyed the Twin Towers, and the Pentagon was hit by a missile.

“All this, of course, would require hundreds if not thousands of people to be in on the plot. It speaks volumes for the determination to believe something,” said David Aaronovitch, the British author of “Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History.”

“This kind of theory really does have a big impact in the Middle East,” he said. “It gets in the way of thinking seriously about the problems in the area and what should be done.”

A U.S. State Department website devotes space to debunking conspiracy theories about Sept. 11, in the apparent belief that the allegations must be addressed forcefully rather than dismissed out of hand as the ruminations of a fringe group.

“Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored. As a superpower, the United States is often cast as a villain in these dramas,” the site says.

Tod Fletcher of Petaluma, California, has worked as an assistant to David Ray Griffin, a retired theology professor, on books that question the Sept. 11 record. He was cautious about the Iranian president’s comments about conspiracy theories, suggesting Ahmadinejad may have been politically motivated by his enmity with the U.S. government.

“It seems like it’s the sort of thing that could lead to further vilification of people who criticize the official account here in the United States,” Fletcher said.

FILE – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addresses the 65th session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in this Sept. 23, 2010 file photo. Amhadinejad declared to the United Nations that most people in the world believe the United States was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File) (Jason Decrow – AP) Network NewsX Profile

“But right now you said that the U.S. government has condemned Iran, and that the U.N. Security Council has, and do you represent them?”

“No I do not,” I shot back. “I am representing fact.”

I asked him about his controversial comments about 9/11, in which he claimed that most people believe that the American government was actually behind the terrorist attacks. I asked how he could say such “an insane and nutty thing” and insult millions of Americans. Using words like “insane” and “nutty” during an interview is not my typical style. Then again, this was hardly a garden variety interview. And Ahmadinejad certainly has never hesitated to lob the most potentially insulting and incendiary accusations towards our country and head of state. I asked what proof he had for such a claim, and pointed out that Usama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda have publicly taken credit for the attacks. He said he was insulted — ironic, given his own comments — and explained that he was not giving his own opinion, but merely exploring some of the theories that have been raised about 9/11.

“I did not give an opinion of my own,” he said. “I actually suggested that a fact- finding group, a mission be formed to delve into the truth. Do you think that the entire world has to accept what the U.S. government tells them?”

President Ahmadinejad again denied that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear bomb, and I asked why anyone should believe him considering the fact that Iran is violating four United Nations Security Council resolutions.

“We do not insist that you should believe us,” he said. “We’ve never said that you should. You are free not to believe us. But why would you insist on exposing your view on us with resolutions, with force?”

He said he would not meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Why should I meet him?” he asked. And he denied Iran supports terrorism, saying “from the day American troops and the allied troops entered Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorists have increased one-hundred fold…we are victims of terrorism.”

He often answered questions with questions, and didn’t want to be interrupted, as I repeatedly tried to clarify and challenge some of his assertions. He accused me “of almost arguing” with him. It’s hard not to “almost argue” with someone who looks you straight in the eye and suggests that your government is behind the killing of thousands of its own people. It’s hard not to “almost argue” with someone who would represent himself as a purveyor of peace, even as his regime continually defies Security Council resolutions regarding its disputed nuclear program and condones the stoning of its own people. It’s hard not to “almost argue” with someone who has questioned the Holocaust and has called for wiping Israel off the map.

And at the end of the day, he insists that his message to the “good people of America” is one of peace and good will….. a message, delivered, as all his statements seems to be, with a smile.

In an interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fox News’ Eric Shawn asked the notorious Iranian President to explain and defend his inflammatory tirade before the United National General Assembly in which he suggested the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 were actually carried out by the U.S. government:

I can tell you that the U.S. government has just replied to — explaining the walkout — quote from the U.S. Mission of the U.N.: “Rather that representing the aspirations and goodwill of the Iranian people, Mr. Ahmadinejad has yet again chosen to spout vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable…

BLITZER: And some of these conspiracy theories in the Middle East go back to 9/11. TODD: That’s right. BLITZER: They believe it was either a U.S. plot or an Israeli plot, or they don’t believe al Qaeda actually was responsible, even though al Qaeda takes responsibility. TODD: Right. BLITZER: It still lingers out there. Those conspiracy theories are wild. Aaron David Miller is right when it comes to the Middle East. TODD: Right.

…it was Hezbollah’s television station al-Manar, six days after 9/11, that “reported” that 4,000 Israelis employed at the World Trade Center did not show up for work that day because they were told in advance of the attacks…. And there are plenty of people, for a variety of reasons, who are ready to buy into such a theory some because they don’t like Israel; some because they don’t like America; some because the preaching of radical Islamic mullahs has brought anti-Semitism into the mosque; some because it is easier to blame the Jew than face up to the challenge of terrorist versions of Islam. The 9/11 conspiracy theory tells a lot about how these things work. It is exactly because the charge is so absurd and shown to be false that it has such appeal. Who could think that Israel would commit such a heinous act against its main ally in the world? The deviousness and cunning that underlies this perspective is what makes it so alluring. The evil that explains it has no bounds. All, it is said, is done to draw the United States into a war against Islam to serve Zionist ends…

… However, where 9/11 conspiracy theorists cross the line into … Let’s bring this down to earth with an illustration: Have you ever wondered why so much of the Arab-Muslim world eagerly believes the wildest, most laughably absurd conspiracy theories?

Right now, for instance, Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV is broadcasting with a straight face the claim that “Zionist squads specializing in car bombs” are terrorizing Iraq. Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, insists that all the bombings of Christian churches in Iraq have been the work of the CIA and Mossad.

By The Associated PressOsama bin Laden’s deputy Al-Zawahri accused Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television yesterday of starting a conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the 2001 suicide airplane attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“The purpose of this lie is clear – [to suggest] there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it,” he said in a tape posted on an Islamic Web site.

The comments reflected al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader Ayman al-Zawahri’s increasing criticism of Iran. Al-Zawahri has accused Iran in recent messages of seeking to extend its power in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and through its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

The authenticity of the two-hour audio recording posted on an Islamic Web site could not be independently confirmed. But the voice sounded like past audiotapes from the terror leader, and the posting where it was found bore the logo of Al-Sahab, al-Qaida’s official media arm.

It was the second of two messages answering questions that were posted to Islamic militant Web sites earlier this year.

One of the questioners asked about the theory that has circulated in the Middle East and elsewhere that Israel was behind the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Al-Zawahri accused Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television of starting the rumor.

“The purpose of this lie is clear _ (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it,” he said.

“Iran’s aim here is also clear to cover up its involvement with America in invading the homes of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said.

Iran cooperated with the United States in the 2001 U.S. assault on Afghanistan that toppled al-Qaida’s allies, the Taliban.

Answering questions about Iraq in Tuesday’s tape, al-Zawahri said the insurgent umbrella group led by al-Qaida, called the Islamic State of Iraq, is “the primary force opposing the Crusaders and challenging Iranian ambitions” in Iraq, he said, referring to the Americans.

As he often does in his messages, al-Zawahri denounced the “Crusader invasion” of Iraq, but in Tuesday’s tape he paired it with a mention of “Iranian complicity” or “Iranian agents.”

In the latest tape, al-Zawahri was also asked if the terror group had further plans to attack Western countries that participated in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and subsequent war.

“My answer is: Yes! We think that any country that has joined aggression on Muslims must be deterred,” he replied.

In response to a question signed by the Japanese news agency Kyodo asking if Japan remains a target because it once had troops in Iraq, al-Zawahri said “Japan provided help under the banner of the crusader coalition … therefore it participated in the Crusader campaign against the lands of Islam.”

Japan deployed non-combat troops to southern Iraq in 2003 to carry out reconstruction work. It withdrew its troops from Iraq in 2006 and now conducts airlifts to help supply U.S.-led forces in that country.

Al-Zawahri spoke on a wide range of issues, even global warming, which he said reflected “how criminal, brutal and greedy the Western Crusader world is, with America at the top.”

He predicted that global warming would “make the world more sympathetic to and understanding of the Muslims’ jihad against the aggressor America.”

Asked if there are any women in al-Qaida, the terror leader answered simply: “No.” In a follow-up answer, he said: “There are no women in al-Qaida jihadi group, but the women of the mujahedeen are playing a heroic role in taking care of their houses and sons.”

In several parts of Tuesday’s audio message, Al-Zawahri claimed that the Taliban took over 95 percent of Afghanistan and is sweeping Pakistan as well.

“The Crusaders and their agents in Pakistan and Afghanistan are starting to fall,” he said.

In another answer Tuesday, al-Zawahri said it was against Islamic religious law for any Muslim to live permanently in a Western country because in doing so they would “have permanent stay there under the laws of the infidels.”

Al-Qaida’s media arm, Al-Sahab, announced in December that al-Zawahri would take questions from the public posted on Islamic militant Web sites and would respond “as soon as possible.” Queries were submitted on the main Islamist Web site until the cutoff date of Jan. 16.

This announcement is noteworthy because it refers to the traded Hezbollah terrorists and other assorted criminals as “heroes.” Right: they are members of a group deemed a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” by the U.S. government and proscribed by U.S. law but ADC calls them “heroes.” I guess it’s clear on which side ADC stands in the war on terror.

The Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the “largest Arab-American grassroots civil rights organization in the United States,” is well known for defending the rights of people of Arab descent…

On October 22, the ADC’s Committee of Western New York held an event commemorating the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, entitled “Memory Lives, Resistance Persists.” Resistance, a word that ADC has used interchangeably for terrorism in reports about the Middle East conflict, was celebrated on the flyer. A popular Palestinian cartoon character, Handala, is seen writing the Arabic words, “Revolution until victory.”In addition, the ADC recently decided to commemorate the career of Helen Thomas, a Lebanese American journalist whose career was ended abruptly in June over an anti-Semitic tirade…

All this, despite public addmissions by Islamists such as at the ‘Muhammad Cartoons’ protests, threatening Europe with a “911” attack

BBC NEWS | UK | Pressure on police over protest Feb 5, 2006 …

The protests on Friday in London over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad saw slogans and placards glorifying the 7 July London bombings… Banners waved during a demonstration in London on Friday featured slogans including “Europe, your 9/11 will come” and – in an apparent reference to the four July 7 suicide bombers – “Europe you will pay, fantastic 4 are on their way”.

… EGrowing dangers in this confrontationLast updated at 09:02 04 February 2006

Europe, your 9/11 will come… bin Laden is on the way… 7/7 on the way… be prepared for the REAL holocaust… So the placards and chants of hate come to London as Muslim demonstrators – people who live, work and have their future here – rage over the offence they have been caused by the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in European newspapers…

Islamofascism: O’Reilly, Whoopi and Joy are all wrong. The 9/11 terrorists weren’t “Muslim extremists” or just plain “Muslims.” A liberal newspaper reporter says they were model Muslims.

More precisely, they were “perfect soldiers” for Allah, says Los Angeles Times national correspondent Terry McDermott.

He would know. After traveling to the hometowns of the Muslim hijackers and investigating their family backgrounds, McDermott discovered they were not heretics or even “extremists,” but in fact good, pious Muslims. And their families and communities encouraged them to join the never-ending Islamic holy war, or jihad, against us.

The lefties at NPR who fired analyst Juan Williams and the cackling hens on “The View” who walked out on his Fox colleague Bill O’Reilly would benefit enormously from reading his book, “Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It.” It would open their PC-encrusted eyes to a truth that is already self-evident to most Americans.

The detail-rich book which is endorsed by anti-war gadfly Seymour Hersh, no less reveals that the 19 hijackers did not “hijack Islam,” as conventional East Coast wisdom would have it. They weren’t career criminals using the religion as an excuse to wantonly murder people. Nor were they misled into martyrdom by Osama bin Laden or other Svengali personalities.

On the contrary, they were deeply religious Muslims following the tenets of their faith, McDermott found. Most of them were from well-off families.

“Several were described as among the best boys bright, respectful in their towns,” he reports in his book. “Many had gone to university,” he adds. “Three had studied Islamic law.” At least one, Ahmed al-Haznawi, had memorized the Quran, a sign of deep devotion much respected by Muslim elders. In fact, he earned the honorary religious title of “hafiz” at a young age.

McDermott describes how another hijacker, Wail al-Shehri left home to train for jihad in Afghanistan after a long period of recitation of Quranic verses. He had the approval of a local imam.

But he wasn’t the only one who knew what they were planning. “Two-thirds of them told their families they were leaving to join the jihad,” McDermott writes, adding that their families did not discourage them. “They went where they were called by their religion.”

a.k.a. al Qaeda; International Front for Fighting Jews and Crusaders; Islamic Army; Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Sites; Islamic Salvation Foundation; The Base; The Group for the Preservation of the Holy Sites; The Islamic Army for the Liberation of the Holy Places; The World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders; Usama bin Ladin Network; Usama bin Ladin Organization; al-Jihad; the Jihad Group; Egyptian al-Jihad; Egyptian Islamic Jihad; New Jihad

Description: Al-Qa’ida (AQ) was established by Usama bin Ladin in 1988 with Arabs who fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. The group helped finance, recruit, transport, and train Sunni Islamic extremists for the Afghan resistance. AQ’s near-term goal is uniting Muslims to fight the United States and its allies, overthrowing regimes it deems “non-Islamic,” and expelling Westerners and non-Muslims from Muslim countries. Its ultimate goal is the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate throughout the world. AQ leaders issued a statement in February 1998 under the banner of “The World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders” saying it was the duty of all Muslims to kill U.S. citizens, civilian and military, and their allies everywhere. AQ merged with al-Jihad (Egyptian Islamic Jihad) in June 2001.

Activities: Even as AQ’s top leaders continue to plot and direct terror attacks worldwide, terrorists affiliated with but not necessarily controlled by AQ have increasingly carried out high-profile attacks. AQ, its affiliates, and those inspired by the group were involved in anti-U.S. and anti-Coalition attacks in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, including suicide bombings and vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices.

AQ has reconstituted some of its pre-9/11 operational capabilities through the reestablishment of a safe haven in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, replacement of captured or killed operational lieutenants, and the restoration of some central control by its top leadership, in particular Ayman al-Zawahiri. Although bin Ladin remains the group’s ideological figurehead, Zawahiri has emerged as AQ’s strategic and operational planner.

AQ is assessed to be the top terrorist threat to the United States and is developing stronger operational relationships with affiliates in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. It is through these “franchises” that AQ has conducted its recent attacks. AQ remains committed to attacking the United States and focuses its planning on targets that would produce mass casualties, dramatic visual destruction, and economic dislocation. In a 1999 interview with the press, bin Ladin’s response to a question about chemical and nuclear weapons was, “Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty.”

The Government of Pakistan accused AQ, along with the Taliban, of being responsible for the October suicide bombing attempt against former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto that killed at least 144 people in Karachi, Pakistan. On December 27, the Government of Pakistan stated that Baitullah Mahsud, a leading Pakistani Taliban commander with close ties to AQ, was responsible for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

In 2006, AQ and affiliated organizations continued major efforts to attack the West and its interests. For example, in mid-August, UK and U.S. authorities foiled a plot to blow up several aircraft. AQ may have been complicit in the plot but the group has made no public statement claiming its involvement. Additionally, al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the February 24, 2006 attack on the Abqaiq petroleum processing facility, the largest such facility in the world, in Saudi Arabia. The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) officially merged with al-Qa’ida in September 2006, subsequently changed its name to al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and attacked a U.S. contractor bus in December 2006 in greater Algiers, marking its first attack against a U.S. entity. On December 11, 2007, AQIM conducted a near-simultaneous double suicide bombing that hit both the Algerian Court building and a UN office building. The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) also officially merged with AQ in November 2007, although no significant LIFG activities have occurred since the merger.

Bin Ladin’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri claimed responsibility on behalf of AQ for multiple attacks on July 7, 2005 against the London public transportation system. The extent of senior leadership involvement in planning the July 2005 attacks was unclear. Some suspects in the attacks included homegrown United Kingdom-based extremists who were “inspired” by AQ.

In 2003 and 2004, Saudi-based AQ operatives and associated extremists launched more than a dozen attacks, killing at least 90 people, including 14 Americans in Saudi Arabia. AQ may have been connected to the suicide bombers and planners of the November 2003 attacks in Istanbul that targeted two synagogues, the British Consulate, and the HSBC Bank, and resulted in the deaths of more than 60 people. Pakistani President Musharraf blames AQ for two attempts on his life in December 2003.

In October 2002, AQ directed a suicide attack on the French tanker MV Limburg off the coast of Yemen that killed one and injured four. The group also carried out the November 2002 suicide bombing of a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya that killed 15. AQ probably provided financing for the October 2002 Bali bombings by Jemaah Islamiya that killed more than 200.

On September 11, 2001, 19 AQ members hijacked and crashed four U.S. commercial jets – two into the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon near Washington, DC, and a fourth into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania – leaving nearly 3,000 individuals dead or missing. In October 2000, AQ conducted a suicide attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, with an explosive-laden boat, killing 17 U.S. Navy sailors and injuring 39. AQ also carried out the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killing at least 301 individuals and injuring more than 5,000 others. AQ and its supporters claim to have shot down U.S. helicopters and killed U.S. servicemen in Somalia in 1993, and to have conducted three bombings that targeted U.S. troops in Aden in December 1992.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the terror group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has released a new statement in which it explains the reasons for its terror campaign and states that they are not fighting the US occupation of Iraq, but to create “an Islamic state which is part of the caliphate and the Muslim territory.” The terror group then goes on to reveal its real objectives, saying: “We are not fighting to chase out the occupier or to save national unity and keep the borders outlined by the infidels intact,” the statement continues. “We are fighting because it is a religious duty to do it, just as it is a duty to take the Sharia [Islamic law] to the government and create an Islamic state.”http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Terrorism&loid=8.0.220033018&par=0

CNN.com – Transcript of Osama bin Laden videotape – December 13, 2001 The following transcript of a videotape of Osama bin Laden talking with others, … until they say there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad. …http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/12/13/tape.transcript/

Al-Qaeda: Kill the Christians By Patrick Poole | Friday, November 17, 2006 An al-Qaeda manual made a surprise reappearance on October 31st in a new repackaged, reformatted edition on an online jihadi forum associated with the terrorist organization. The manual, A Guide for the Undecided on the Legitimacy of Killing Christians, (Irshad al-Hayara fi Ibahat Dimaa al-Nasara) made its first appearance back in September 2002, published by the al-Qaeda “think tank,” the now defunct Center for Islamic Research and Study, in their bi-weekly magazine, Sawt al-Jihad (The Voice of Jihad). Translated excerpts from the 56-page manual, authored by Hafid Abu-Basir, are available from the Site Institute.http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=da70c52b-fcbd-48b5-8418-33c06dc32585

Some of the German-speaking militants who have been training for attacks on Western targets in Pakistani training camps may have come from the same Hamburg mosque where Mohammed Atta and other 9/11 hijackers gathered.

US and European officials said Tuesday they had detected a plot to carry out a major, coordinated series of commando-style terror attacks in Britain, France, Germany and possibly the United States by jihadis carrying European passports a threat they say they learned of from a captured German-speaking terror suspect.

Guido Steinberg, a counter-terrorism analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said German jihadis have been recruited from mosques in Berlin, Bonn and Hamburg, including the former Al Quds mosque, where Ramzi Binalshibh, Atta, hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi and other conspirators joined forces.

German authorities shut down the al Quds mosque, which had since been renamed Taiba, on August 9. According to Der Spiegel, they raided the Taiba mosque because they believed it was still promoting jihad and that it “may have been a staging area” for would-be jihadis who traveled to training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. German investigators said at the time that they believed 10 men from the mosque had gone to the camps.

Officials now believe at least one team of German jihadists was dispatched to Europe over the summer, travelling on German passports.

Steinberg said it was “quite shocking” that the former al Quds mosque was still producing jihadis. “There is a certain amount of continuity in German jihadism,’ said Steinberg.

“Young men were being turned into religious fanatics there,” said Christoph Ahlhaus, secretary of the interior for the city of Hamburg at the time the mosque was shut.

“Hamburg cannot become a cradle for Islamists capable of violence,” said Ahlhaus, who has since become mayor of Hamburg.

Intelligence and law enforcement authorities in the US and Europe said the information about possible commando-style attacks was based on the interrogation of a suspected German terrorist allegedly captured on his way to Europe in late summer and now being held at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

The captured German reportedly said several teams of attackers, all with European passports, had been trained and dispatched from training camps in Waziristan and Pakistan. Officials say the German claimed the attack plan had been approved by Osama Bin Laden.

2006 (Aug.): Police arrest 24 British-born Muslims, most of whom
have ties to Pakistan, who had allegedly plotted to blow up as many as 10
planes using liquid explosives. Officials say details of the plan were similar
to other schemes devised by al-Qaeda.

2007 (April): Eight people, including two Iraqi legislators, die
when a suicide bomber strikes inside the Parliament building in Baghdad. An
organization that includes al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia claims responsibility. In
another attack, the Sarafiya Bridge that spans the Tigris River is
destroyed.

2007 (June): British police find car bombs in two vehicles in
London. The attackers reportedly tried to detonate the bombs using cell phones
but failed. Government officials say al-Qaeda is linked to the attempted
attack. The following day, an SUV carrying bombs bursts into flames after it
slams into an entrance to Glasgow Airport. Officials say the attacks are
connected.

2007 (Dec.): As many as 60 people are killed in two suicide attacks
near United Nations offices and government buildings in Algiers, Algeria. The
bombings occur within minutes of each other. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,
formerly called the Salafist Group for Preaching, claims responsibility. It’s
the worst attack in the Algeria in more than 10 years.

2007 (Dec.): Benazir Bhutto, former Pakistani prime minister, is
assassinated in a suicide attack on Dec. 27, 2007, at a campaign rally in
Rawalpindi, Pakistan. President Pervez Musharraf blames al Qaeda for the
attack, which kills 23 other people. Baitullah Mehsud, a Taliban leader with
close ties to al Qaeda is later cited as the assassin.

2008 (Jan.): In the worst attack in Iraq in months, a suicide
bomber kills 30 people at a home where mourners were paying their respects to
the family of a man killed in a car bomb. The Iraqi military blames the attack
on al-Qaeda in Iraq.

2008 (Feb.): Nearly 100 people die when two women suicide bombers,
who are believed to be mentally impaired, attack crowded pet markets in
eastern Baghdad. The U.S. military says al-Qaeda in Iraq has been recruiting
female patients at psychiatric hospitals to become suicide bombers.

2008 (April): A suicide car bomber kills 40 people in Baquba, the
capital of Diyala Province in Iraq.

2008 (April): Thirty-five people die and 62 are injured when a
woman detonates explosives that she was carrying under her dress in a busy
shopping district in Iraq’s Diyala Province.

2008 (May): At least 12 worshipers are killed and 44 more injured
when a bomb explodes in the Bin Salman mosque near Sana, Yemen.

2008 (May): An al-Qaeda suicide bomber detonates explosives in Hit,
a city in the Anbar Province of Iraq, killing six policemen and four
civilians, and injuring 12 other people.

2008 (June): A car bomb explodes outside the Danish Embassy in
Pakistan, killing six people and injuring dozens. Al-Qaeda claims
responsibility, saying the attack was retaliation for the 2006 publication of
political cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that
depicted the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

2008 (June): A suicide bomber kills at least 20 people at a meeting
between sheiks and Americans in Karmah, a town west of Baghdad.

2008 (Aug.): About two dozens worshippers are killed in three
separate attacks as they make their way toward Karbala to celebrate the
birthday of 9th-century imam Muhammad al-Mahdi. Iraqi officials blame al-Qaeda
in Iraq for the attacks.

2008 (Aug.): A bomb left on the street explodes and tears through a
bus carrying Lebanese troops, killing 15 people, nine of them soldiers. No one
claims responsibility for the attack, but in 2007, the army fought an al-Qaeda
linked Islamist group in Tripoli.

2008 (Aug.): At least 43 people are killed when a suicide bomber
drives an explosives-laden car into a police academy in Issers, a town in
northern Algeria.

2008 (Aug.): Two car bombs explode at a military command and a
hotel in Bouira, killing a dozen people. No group takes responsibility for
either attack, Algerian officials said they suspect al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb is behind the bombings.

2008 (Sept.): In its first acknowledged ground attack inside
Pakistan, U.S. commandos raid a village that is home to al-Qaeda militants in
the tribal region near the border with Afghanistan. The number of casualties
is unclear.

2008 (Sept.): A car bomb and a rocket strike the U.S. embassy in
Yemen as staff arrived to work, killing 16 people, including 4 civilians. At
least 25 suspected al-Qaeda militants are arrested for the attack.

2008 (Nov.): at least 28 people die and over 60 more are injured
when three bombs explode minutes apart in Baghdad, Iraq. Officials suspect the
explosions are linked to al-Qaeda.

2009 (April): on April 6 in Baghdad, a series of six attacks kills
36 people and injure more than 100 in Shiite neighborhoods; April 23: at least
80 people are killed in three separate suicide bombings in Baghdad. This is
the largest single-day death toll due to attacks since February 2008. One of
the bombings is reportedly set off by a female, who was standing among a group
of women and children receiving food aid.

2009 (Dec.): A Nigerian man on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit
attempted to ignite an explosive device hidden in his underwear. The explosive
device that failed to detonate was a mixture of powder and liquid that did not
alert security personnel in the airport. The alleged bomber, Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab, told officials later that he was directed by the terrorist
group al-Qaeda. The suspect was already on the government’s watch list when he
attempted the bombing; his father, a respected Nigerian banker, had told the
U.S. government that he was worried about his son’s increased extremism.

2009 (Dec.): A suicide bomber kills eight Americans civilians,
seven of them CIA agents, at a base in Afghanistan. It’s the deadliest attack
on the agency since 9/11. The attacker is reportedly a double agent from
Jordan who was acting on behalf of al-Qaeda.

2010 (Oct.): Two packages are found on separate cargo planes. Each
package contains a bomb consisting of 300 to 400 grams (11-14 oz) of plastic
explosives and a detonating mechanism. The bombs are discovered as a result of
intelligence received from Saudi Arabia’s security chief. The packages, bound
from Yemen to the United States, are discovered at en route stop-overs, one in
England and one in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. A week after the
packages are found, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) takes
responsibility for the plot.

2011 (Jan.): Two Frenchmen are killed in Niger. France highly
suspects the al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

2011 (April): Men claiming to be Moroccan members of AQIM appear on
the internet and threaten to attack Moroccan interests. The following week a
bomb killing 15 people, including 10 foreigners, explodes in Marrakesh, Morocco.

1985Atta studies architecture in the Engineering Faculty at Cairo University. According to his peers, he is an average student. In 1990, Atta joins the Engineers Syndicate, which is one of three professional associations controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, although he later says that he was not a member of the Muslim Brotherhoodhttp://www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/maps/timeline.htm

who recruited 9/11 leader Mohamed AttaPosted: December 10, 20061:00 am Eastern2008 WorldNetDaily.com WASHINGTON With suggestions the U.S. negotiate with Syria and Iran dominating the news, Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin reports Washington has already been talking quietly to a Syrian dissident group linked directly to the 9/11 hijackers and their sponsors in al-Qaida. The group is the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, known for its association with al-Qaida and allied with former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein….Spanish investigators linked al-Qaida leader Imad Eddit Barakat Yarkas in Madrid with fellow Syrian Muslim Brotherhood member Mohammad Haydar Zammar in Hamburg. Along with Barakat, Spanish authorities arrested five other al-Qaida members of Syrian descent. Yarkas and Zammar knew the Egyptian, Mohamed Atta, reputed leader of the 9-11 hijackers. Investigators report that Zammar not only had created the Hamburg al-Qaida cell but recruited Atta as well. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53309

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba (AFP) — Self-proclaimed architect of the September 11 attacks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants said Monday they would confess to terror charges that could bring the death penalty but postponed their guilty pleas.

Score one for the Muslim Brotherhood.SPECIAL REPORT: The Bush administration has decided that calling the enemy by his name is too risky, too politically incorrect, or oddly, somehow too laudatory…The U.S. government seems to think that declaring such links don’t exist will make it so. Score one for the Muslim Brotherhood.As Walid Phares describes in his post-9/11 three-book series on the meaning…What motivates the international Islamic jihad movement is a literal textual interpretation of doctrinal Islam as laid out in the Koran, hadith, and Sunna plus centuries of Islamic scholarship and consensus on the concept of just war. Within this construct, it is true that words such as jihad, mujahedin, and Caliphate carry intensely positive and honorable connotations for the Muslim jihadis but hardly for the rest of us, their intended targets for subjugation within the totalitarian system that Sharia would impose. In any case, use or non-use by infidels of the very terms by which jihadis identify themselves, to the extent that it might even be noticed, cannot possibly confer any additional measure of legitimacy on what has been for the mujahedin a centuries-old campaign of duty to spread their faith.What Americans need to understand is that Islamic jihadis, whether part of a formal terrorist organization such as al-Qaida or the Muslim Brotherhood, or merely ideologically driven by the actions and proclamations of such groups, are internally motivated by what they believe is a divine mandate to fight and kill until the entire world comes under the sway of Dar al-Islam (where Sharia law prevails). The only relevance for this enemy that the choice of descriptive words may have is in the area of psychological operations.If the jihadi enemy can achieve such a state of muddled confusion among the top administrative, legislative, and military leadership of its primary enemy (the United States of America) that we no longer even permit ourselves to utter the name of those sworn to our destruction, then truly they are winning the “War of Ideas.”From a series of excellent recent media pieces, as well as extensive documentation entered into evidence in last year’s Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial, we now know the extent of Muslim Brotherhood activity throughout our society.Muslim Brotherhood organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), all three listed by the Department of Justice as unindicted co-conspirators, have achieved unprecedented access to the Department of Defense and even the White House. But aware now of the enemy’s stealth and cunning in seeking to influence U.S. national security policy, the nation is obligated to reject his agenda an agenda that prioritizes concealment until it is too late of the true nature of their campaign of conquest, whether by Dawa (persuasion, including by way of deception) or terrorist attack.http://www.metimes.com/Politics/2008/04/28/score_one_for_the_muslim_brotherhood/9562/

Al shabaab refuses aid agencies to help the needy Somalis – Shabelle [Jan 12, 2011] MOGADISHU (Sh. M. Network) – Somalia’s Al shabaab movement refused international and local aid agencies to reach droughts affected areas in southen and central Somalia to help the needy Somalis, an Al shabaab official said on Wednesday. Sheikh Suldan Mohammed Ala Mohammed, an Al shabaab official, has told local Mogadishu radios that they will never allow aid agencies to operate in the regions under their control. Ala Mohammed charged those aid agencies with having hidden agendas in which they want to propagate and promulgate the Christianity, adding that they also want to launch brain wash attacks against ordinary people of Somalia.

Daily Monitor: – World | Al-shabaab opposes banned groups from returning to Somalia By Abdulkadir Khalif Posted Saturday, July 23 2011 at 00:00 Radical Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab has said organisations already banned in the war-torn country will not be allowed back. Al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamoud Raghe alias Sheikh Ali Dhere, said the said organisations were not welcome to Somali, currently facing severe humanitarian crisis. “The organisations that we banned cannot come back,” the spokesman stated Thursday evening. “Such entities are not included among those now invited to provide humanitarian aid,” he added, without naming the affected organisations. Sheikh Ali Dhere was reacting to a report by the United Nations on Wednesday that famine had hit two parts of rebel-held Somalia, due to a severe drought affecting more than 10 million people in the Horn of Africa. http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/World/-/688340/1205942/-/11g6gk4/-/index.html

Islamist group in Somalia bans samosas after deciding they’re too Western..’ By Stewart Maclean Last updated at 3:28 PM on 26th July 2011 Somalia’s al-Shabaab group has banned samosas after ruling the popular snacks are ‘offensive’ and too Christian.

Militant Islamist fighters last week used vehicles mounted with loudspeakers to announce the bizarre ruling across the regions of the war-torn country it controls. The extremist group has offered no official explanation for the ban on the triangular snacks, which are commonly cooked up and served across the Horn of Africa… The bizarre ban comes just days after militants linked to Al-Qaida in Somalia refused to let some aid workers into the country as tens of thousands suffered in the nation’s massive famine. Aid groups including the UN Food Programme say they were not given permission by militants to provide aid in the country, where it has been warned that 800,000 children could die from starvation. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2018858/Islamist-group-Somalia-bans-samosas-deciding-theyre-Western.html

BBC News – Somali Islamists maintain aid ban and deny famine – Jul 22, 2011 – Somalia’s al-Shabab Islamists have denied lifting their ban on some Western aid agencies and say UN reports of famine are “sheer propaganda”. The UN on Wednesday said that parts of Somalia were suffering a famine after the worst drought in 60 years. A spokesman for al-Shabab, which has ties to al-Qaeda and controls much of the country, accused the banned groups of being political.

But the UN insists famine exists and it will continue its aid efforts. Most Western aid agencies quit Somalia in 2009 following al-Shabab’s threats, though some say they have managed to continue operating through local partners. Some 10 million people are said to need food aid across East Africa but Somalia is by far the worst-affected country, as there is no national government to co-ordinate aid after two decades of fighting. Thousands of people are fleeing areas under al-Shabab control to camps set up in areas of the capital controlled by the weak interim government, which is battling the Islamist insurgents. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) was one of those banned. [Many Somali mothers have already seen their children die in the drought] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14246764

Al-Qaeda Affiliate, not Famine, is Responsible for Somalian Genocide Townhall Columnists Rachel Alexander 9/5/2011 Somalia is in the midst of a famine, suffering from the worst drought in 60 years. 29,000 Somali children have died within the past three months, and 100,000 Somalis are expected to die in the next few weeks. The al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabab has destroyed the country, taking over much of the southern part of the country where it has imposed a strict version of Sharia law. The Taliban-like organization refuses to allow humanitarian organizations associated with the West to provide aid to the starving people. Al-Shabab expelled the U.N.’s World Food Programme, which had provided the bulk of the aid, from much of the country in January 2010, accusing it of being a U.S. proxy. Incredulously, some are blaming the U.S. for the famine, not al-Shabab. http://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2011/09/05/al-qaeda_affiliate,_not_famine,_is_responsible_for_somalian_genocide

The militants of Al-shabab have refused food transporting Lories to reach at El-waq district of Gedo region in southern Somalia where is currently under the control of the transitional government of Somalia, officials, residents said on Friday Al-shabab fighters had refused all vehicles traveling to Luq district in the same region where the troops of the transitional government of Somalia had forcibly taken over that caused more of the residents to express sorrowful over the cruelty steps of Al-shabab forces in the region. http://www.mareeg.com/fidsan.php?sid=19192&tirsan=3

In Somalia – Jihad Uber Alles

Posted by David Meir-Levi

on Aug 17th, 2011 The drought in the Horn of Africa that began in 2009 is the worst in 60 years. But humanitarian aid from the UN, the USA and other countries has prevented mass starvation in the nations of that region, except one. In Somalia that drought soon turned into a famine of unprecedented proportions. To date almost 30,000 children under the age of 5 have died of starvation, according to U.S. estimates. The UN fears that at least 640,000 Somali children are acutely malnourished: a statistic that suggests the death toll of small children could rise to as many as 800,000! More than one million Somalis have fled to Ethiopia and Kenya, where makeshift refugee camps house hundreds of thousands.[1]

One might expect that all Somali leaders and political parties would join forces to help their people survive this enormous tragedy; but one would be wrong. The Somali Muslim terrorists known as al-Shabaab have worked for the past two years to prevent any foreign aid from reaching their Muslim Somali co-religionists, even as tens of thousands of Somali Muslim children die of starvation and hundreds of thousands of starving Muslim families flee al-Shabaab’s reach to find food and water in nearby Kenya and Ethiopia. Harakat ash-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (the “Organization of the Youth Jihad Fighters”), or al-Shabaab (“the lads” or “the youths” in Arabic) for short, is a group of Islamist terrorist jihadis fighting to overthrow the Muslim government of Somalia in order to replace it with a government committed to a more extreme form of Islam and to Shari’a law. The group now controls large swathes of southern Somalia. Its leaders claim that they are waging war against the “enemies of Islam” which includes the present Somali government. Al-Shabaab is an offshoot of Hizbul Islam (“The Islamic Party”), formed to fight the Somali government of President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed.

In December, 2010 Hizbul Islam merged with al-Shabaab to better implement jihad against President Ahmed and his government. Al-Shabaab has been designated a terrorist organization by several western governments. Al-Shabaab leaders formerly denied any connection with el-Qaeda, but early in 2010 they acknowledged that they worked with el-Qaeda forces in Pakistan and Yemen for training and deployment. The U.N. and the USA blame al-Shabaab for the famine, because its terrorist forces, under el-Qaeda influence, have created the single greatest obstacle to humanitarian assistance in Somalia. Thanks to al-Shabaab, the rate of malnutrition in southern Somalia is the highest in the world, approaching half the population, according to CNN. In addition to denying aid workers access to the regions where the drought and famine rage, al-Shabaab terrorists force local Somali Muslim humanitarian organizations to pay “taxes” (aka bribes) in order to be able to funnel food and other supplies to the devastated areas. They demand bribes from U.N. and from aid agency officials to allow them to work in areas under al-Shabaab control. In some cases, al-Shabaab terrorists have burned food stocks and medicine, and have kidnapped or killed charity workers, when bribes were not paid. These “taxes” can be as high as $10,000 for access to the areas al-Shabaab controls.

Then there are the “registration fees” of another $10,000, and payments of $6,000 every six months, as well as 20 percent of the value of all food and other supplies and 10 percent on all vehicles, as a form of “import duties.” Their terrorism pays well; but their extorted wealth and their Islamic jihad agenda come at the expense of the lives of hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of their own people. A gut-wrenching and tragic example of this kind of Islamofascist tyranny is reported in a recent Newsweek magazine interview[2] with a local Somali doctor. Dr. Hawa Abdi is an obstetrician and gynecologist running a clinic near Mogadishu since 1983. Today her medical compound holds 90,000 people, mostly women and children, all homeless refugees fleeing al-Shabaab and the famine. Al-Shabaab’s predecessor, the terrorist group Hizbul Islam, invaded her hospital and camp in 2010 in order to shut her down and take over her property and the hospital, because she is a woman and “…women are not allowed to shoulder any responsibility and authority.”[3] She refused even though they threatened to shoot her. They relented and she kept her medical compound and back-yard refugee camp running. This year however, al-Shabaab leaders, now emboldened by their merger with Hizbul Islam, attacked her hospital and home and compound (refuge to 90,000 homeless starving Somali Muslims!) with artillery and automatic weapons, in retaliation for her having been candid in a BBC radio interview about the damage that al-Shabaab has done in Somalia. They targetted the maternity and surgical wards and the pediatric malnutrition center. Hundreds died and thousands more fled, despite their need for medical care, only to die in the Somali desert. This vengeful cruelty becomes utterly unimaginable when one learns that some of these al-Shebaab attackers have their own wives and mothers living as refugees in Dr. Abdi’s compound.[4] Why does al-Shabaab wreck this horrific inhuman brutality against their own Muslim Somali people? As al-Shabaab spokespersons explain it, alien non-Muslim groups cannot be permitted to enter Somalia because they might host spies, or worse, promote an un-Islamic way of life among the Somali Muslims. According to some al-Shabaab representatives, the U.N.’s declaration of famine in parts of Somalia is politically motivated and “pure propaganda;” and attacks on humanitarian workers and the restrictions against the UN and other groups bringing food to starving Somalis are merely self-defense against foreign non-Muslim influences that might corrupt the pure Islamic way of life for Somali Muslims. Al-Shabaab leaders insist that there is no famine.

The claims of famine are a hoax, they say, perpetrated by Christians who have an anti-Muslim strategy to transport Somali Muslims abroad, especially into Christian countries like Ethiopia and Kenya, “…so that their faith can be destroyed and they could be staff and soldiers for the Christians.” Meanwhile, 30,000 children have died, hundreds of thousands more are malnourished, half-a-million Somali adults are starving, and 1.5 million are homeless; but Somali Islam is kept pure and unsullied by kafir influences. This is conspiracy theory gone ballistic, psychotic mass murder of these terrorists’ own people in order to advance their Muslim jihadist agenda. When the lives of hundreds of thousands of their own Muslim kin mean nothing compared to improving the chances of an al-Shabaab jihad victory in Somalia, we must acknowledge that we are dealing with psychopathic mass murder: Jihad uber Alles. The good news is that Somali government forces have driven al-Shabaab from Somalia’s capitol city, Mogadishu, and have opened the port and roads for UN and USAID supplies and aid workers, at least in the capitol city. Moreover, al-Shabaab may have been weakened both by the government forces’ liberation of Mogadishu and by the blowback of discontent from millions of starving or near-starving Somalis who correctly see al-Shabaab as the cause of their plight. So al-Shebaab’s totalitarian ruthless inhumane treatment of its own Muslim people may now backfire as Somalis suffer mass starvation and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by al-Shebaab’s blockade and attacks on hospitals and aid workers. Is this a localized Somali tragedy, or should al-Shabaab’s unspeakable cruelty concern the USA?

U.S. Rep. Peter T. King (R-NY) has answered that question. On July 27, Rep. King, Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, convened a Homeland Security meeting in Washington D.C., entitled “Al Shabaab: Recruitment and Radicalization within the Muslim American Community and the Threat to the Homeland.” He said: “Some argue that al-Shabaab is only a Somali problem…(but)…that kind of thinking is a glaring example of what the 9/11 Commission called a failure of imagination.” In his presentation, Rep. King documented that Al-Shabaab operatives in the USA and Canada are engaged in an ongoing successful effort to recruit and radicalize young Muslim Somali Americans for jihad. These young Somali Americans are trained by el-Qaeda in Pakistan, and have been deployed in Yemen, Afghanisan, and Somalia. Some of the recruits who joined Al-Shabaab’s terror cadres in Somalia have been killed in the fighting there, and three became suicide bombers. One who quickly rose to the rank of commander in al-Shabaab in Somalia, Mr. Omar Hammami, was raised a Baptist in Alabama! Al-Shabaab in the USA has been far more successful in recruiting Somali American citizens to their terror ranks than has el-Qaeda. Somali Al-Shabaab emissaries recruit actively in mosques in Somali communities all over the USA, with no opposition from local non-Somali imams (though lack of opposition may be out of fear rather than out of support for the al-Shabaab jihad). Federal prosecutions for funding terrorism and recruiting for terrorist groups are the most numerous for Somali-American Muslims than for other Muslim Americans working for other terror organizations. According to Rep. King, these Somali-American Muslim recruits pose a serious threat of home-grown terrorism. “…this threat is real, and …. al-Shabaab leaders’ public calls for attacks against America — including in retaliation for killing bin Laden — must be taken seriously. With a large group of Muslim-Americans willing to die as “martyrs,” and a strong operational partnership with al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and in Yemen, al-Shabaab now has more capability than ever to strike the U.S. homeland.” We must learn from our 9/11 “failure of imagination” and pay close attention to Rep. King’s admonitions. The Somali al-Shabaab display utterly inhuman ruthlessness as they callously condemn hundreds of thousands of their own to death by starvation, in the name of Allah and jihad. Home-grown Somali-American jihadists, trained by al-Qaeda and battle hardened in Somalia and elsewhere, can be expected to treat American kafiroon no less harshly. We must connect the dots now, and take pre-emptive defensive action, before al-Shabaab or their ilk perpetrate another 9/11. Notes: [1] For more details cf. Newsweek, August 1 & 8, 2011 pp. 14-15, “Race against Tragedy,” no author noted, not yet available on line at the time of the composition of this article. [2] Abdi, Dr. Hawa and Robbins, Sarah J., Newsweek, August 15, 2011, pp. 42 ff. “Under Siege in Somalia: A People plagued by Catastrophic Famine – and the Tyranny of Islamist Fanatics,” not yet available on line at the time of the composition of this article. [3] Ibid supra, n. #2. [4] Ibid supra, n. #2. http://homeland.house.gov/press-release/king-opens-third-committee-homeland-security-hearing-radicalization-focusing-alhttp://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/17/in-somalia-jihad-uber-alles/

10 Years on – radical ISLAM the Enemy – ever more menacing West in its quest for ‘World domination’

Radical Islam: What You Need to Know’ Released Nationwide
Author Urges Social Media Prayer Pledges as 10th Anniversary of 9/11 Terrorist Attacks Approaches
DALLAS, Aug. 31, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — “Radical Islam: What You Need to Know,” the latest book by author, educator and cultural apologist, Dr. Jim Denison, is now available at Christian bookstores and major bookseller websites across America.

As the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist acts approaches, Denison invites Christian readers to download a complimentary daily devotional and prayer guide, “Redeeming 9/11: Building God’s Kingdom Today.” He also invites readers to share via Twitter or the Denison Forum’s Facebook wall their Prayer Pledge to engage spiritually in praying for our country.

The most dangerous Muslims in America may be black converts to Islam, according to a shocking new poll by the Pew Research Center.

African-American Muslims tend to hold the most violent views among U.S. Muslims surveyed by Pew in a poll released this week.

Fully 28 percent of U.S.-born black Muslim respondents said “suicide bombings and other violence against civilians” can be justified sometimes or at least in rare cases. That compares with 9 percent of foreign-born Muslims who hold the same view.

Pew also found that 11 percent of black Muslims living in the U.S. have a favorable opinion of al-Qaida – more than double the share of U.S. Muslims overall who hold that view. Another 21 percent of black Muslims hold only mildly unfavorable views of the terrorist organization responsible for attacking America 10 years ago; while 56 percent of that segment of the Muslim population hold very unfavorable views.

[…]
A popular African-American imam has preached that Islamic law permits Muslims to attack U.S. military targets – including C-130 military transport planes carrying the 82nd Airborne out of Fort Bragg, N.C., according to the best-selling book, “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.”

The Muslim cleric, Zaid Shakir, a frequent guest speaker at Council on American-Islamic Relations events, tells his Muslim audiences: “Jihad is physically fighting the enemies of Islam to protect and advance the religion of Islam. This is jihad.”

Commentary: Arnaud de Borchgrave
Global con?
Published: Sept. 1, 2011 at 8:21 AM
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large
[…]
Before year’s end in 2007, LIFG was calling for jihad against Gadhafi and also against the United States and Western “infidels.”
Every intelligence agency in the United States, Europe and the Arab world knows where Belhaj is coming from,” writes Escobar. Belhaj has made sure in Libya that he and his militia will only settle for Shariah law.http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/de-Borchgrave/2011/09/01/Commentary-Global-con/UPI-859113148797 13/?spt=hs&or=an

Howard teen arrested in suspected terror plot
By Peter Hermann and Justin Fenton, Published: August 26 [2011]
He was a 15-year-old high school honors student in Ellicott City when federal prosecutors say he went online to solicit money for a woman who called herself “Jihad Jane” and “Fatima LaRose.”
Authorities say that in Web postings two years ago, the youth “appealed for urgent funds” for the suspected terrorist, whose real name is Colleen R. LaRose, 47, of Philadelphia. “I know the sister and by Allah, all money will be transferred to her.”http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/howard-teen-arrested-in-suspected-terror-plot/2011/08/26/gIQAwTm GhJ_story.html

Mother of 9/11 ’20th hijacker’: I was blind to son’s extremismBy Peter Wilkinson, CNNSeptember 2, 2011 2:47 a.m. EDT
Her son remains the only man convicted in the US over the 9/11 plot. … of being part of a broader terror conspiracy in the months leading up to 9/11… Moussaoui started to attend London’s more radical mosques and was asked to leave the moderate Brixton mosque because of his talks about a jihad, or holy war, against the West.http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/09/01/september.11.moussaoui.mother/

‘Peace talks between government, MILF to continue despite threat’‎
Philippine Star – Updated September 01, 2011 10:00
… Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) would continue despite the threat of renegade … The MILF has been fighting government troops for decades to establish a self-rule Muslim state in the south of the predominantly Catholic country. Peace talks between the government and the MILF remain stalled since August 2008 following the aborted signing of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain.http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=722926&publicationSubCategoryId=200

A dangerous new level
The president is facing a growing terrorist threat
Sep 3rd 2011 | ABUJA | from the print edition

..A SUICIDE-BOMBING on August 26th at the headquarters of the UN in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, which left at least 23 people dead, has sharply raised the stakes in the conflict between the government and its terrorist opponents. It was the first suicide-bombing in Nigeria to target an international body. It has rattled foreign residents. And it has made people question whether President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration has a convincing plan to stop such attacks.

The prime suspect is Boko Haram, an extremist Muslim group whose name means “Western education is sinful”. One of its spokesmen told foreign journalists that the action had been carried out to avenge the humiliating treatment of its members by Nigeria’s army and police. Although reluctant to admit to an embarrassing failure of security, Nigerian officials have blamed the sect.

The attack marks a big leap in Boko Haram’s ambitions and suggests it may now be colluding with other more established groups, including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which made a similar attack on UN offices in Algeria four years ago. The Nigerian secret police say that a member of Boko Haram recently came back from Somalia to oversee the attack.

Most of the sect’s activities have hitherto been confined to the dusty north-east of Africa’s most populous nation, on the fringe of the Sahara desert. But in recent months it has expanded beyond its home ground. The latest bombing is the second in the capital since June, when the chief of police narrowly avoided being blown up in his headquarters.

In July Mr Jonathan set up a committee to look into the turmoil in the north-east, Boko Haram’s base. But it has been slow to report. Unless the president soon presents a plan of action, Nigerians and foreign investors may lose confidence in his government’s ability to deal with the problem.

It is hard to gauge the extent of Boko Haram’s following. It has no clear structure or evident chain of command. Poverty in the area has helped drive young men into the arms of radical Islam. Fervent religious extremism has encouraged people to assail the government. The security services’ heavy-handed tactics in trying to quash the violence with random arrests, killings and disappearances have fuelled the discontent. Counter-insurgency experts are urging them to be less bellicose.http://www.economist.com/node/21528307

Al-Qaida not the only U.S. enemy
COMMENTARY
By CLIFFORD MAY
Syndicated columnist

Published: Monday, August 29, 2011 at 6:15 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, August 29, 2011 at 6:23 a.m.
Nearly 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, many politicians, diplomats, journalists and academics remain reluctant even to name America’s enemies.

To take but one example: John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, has argued that America is only “at war with al-Qaida” and its closest affiliates.

I understand the impulse to frame the conflict as narrowly as possible. Brennan and others do not want to reinforce al-Qaida’s message that Muslims from Afghanistan to Iraq to Israel to Paris to Detroit must choose between the umma, the global Islamic community, and the West – to fight for one and against the other.

But can we not say – truthfully and without playing into al-Qaida’s hands – that there are regimes and groups within the Muslim world that are implacably hostile to the West? Can we not say that they subscribe to a belief system called Jihadism? The late Father Richard John Neuhaus defined Jihadism as a religiously inspired ideology built on the teaching “that it is the moral obligation of all Muslims to employ whatever means necessary in order to compel the world’s submission to Islam.”http://www.newschief.com/article/20110829/NEWS/108295013/1013/sitemaps

Spanish Town Becoming “New Mecca of the Most Radical Islamism”
by Soeren Kern
September 1, 2011 at 5:00 am
The municipality of Salt, a town near Barcelona where Muslim immigrants now make up 40% of the population, has approved a one-year ban on the construction of new mosques. It is the first ban of its kind in Spain.

The moratorium follows public outrage over plans to build a massive Salafi mosque that is being financed by Saudi Arabia. Salafism is a branch of revivalist Islam that calls for restoring past Muslim glory by forcibly re-establishing an Islamic empire (Caliphate) across the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Europe such as Spain, which Salafists view as a Muslim state that must be reconquered for Islam.http://www.hudson-ny.org/2394/salt-spain-radical-islamism

Iran should do more to protect its ethnic minorities such as Arabs, Kurds and Baluch, a United Nations human rights body said on Friday.

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), a group of 18 independent rights experts, said Iran lacked data on the numbers of ethnic minorities despite a census in 2007, but the participation of such people in public life appeared to be lower than could be expected.

Several armed groups opposed to the government are active in Iran, mostly made up of ethnic Kurds in the northwest, Baluch in the southeast and Arabs in the southwest.

“The Committee expresses concern at the limited enjoyment of political, economic, social and cultural rights by… Arab, Azeri, Balochi, Kurdish communities and some communities of non-citizens,” it said in a report on a regular review of Iran’s compliance with a 1969 international treaty banning racism.

It also urged Iran to continue its efforts to empower women and promote their rights, paying particular attention to women belonging to ethnic minorities.

Some tenets of Islamic sharia law disadvantage Iranian women, Indian committee member Dilip Lahiri said. “On the other hand, in terms of their education and access to jobs, very remarkable progress has been made in Iran,” he told a briefing.

The committee voiced concern at reports of a selection procedure for state officials and employees, known as gozinesh, requiring them to demonstrate allegiance to the Islamic Republic of Iran and the state religion, which could limit opportunities for ethnic and religious minorities.

It said that lack of complaints was not proof of the absence of racial discrimination, as victims may not have confidence in the police or judicial authorities to handle them.

It called on Iran to set up an independent national human rights institution and report back to it at the start of 2013 on how it was dealing with the concerns and recommendations.

Iran and the challenge of diversity: Islamic fundamentalism, Aryanist racism, and democratic struggles
Alireza Asgharzadeh, Palgrave Connect (Online service)
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 – 249 pages
This book interrogates the racist construction of Arya/Aria and Aryanism in an Iranian context, arguing that a racialized interpretation of these concepts has given the Indo-European speaking Persian ethnic group an advantage over Iran?s non-Persian nationalities and communities. Based on multidisciplinary research drawing on history, sociology, literature, politics, anthropology and cultural studies, Alireza Asgharzadeh critiques the privileged place of Farsi and the Persian ethnic group in contemporary Iran. The book highlights difference and diversity as major socio-political issues that will determine the future course of social, cultural, and political developments in Iran. Pointing to the increasing inadequacy of Islamic fundamentalism in functioning as a grand narrative, Asgharzadeh explores the racist approach of the current Islamic government to issues of difference and diversity in the country, and shows how these issues are challenging the very existence of the Islamic regime in Iran.http://books.google.com/books?id=RlY-SQAACAAJ

Iran: A People Interrupted
Hamid Dabashi – New Press, 2008 – 324 pages – Page 151
And the bogus pro- Palestinian politics of the reigning regime degenerates into an anti-Jewish language. Iranian racism is particularly evident in Tehran, where similar racist negativity is directed at provincial Iranians— the Isfahanis, the Rashtis, the Azaris, the Kurds, the Lors, the Baluchis, the Arabs, or what the Tehranis in moments of unsurpassed whitewashed racism call dehatis, a nasty derogatory term meaning “the peasants.” The roots of this Tehrani-based racism is deeply buried in the whitewashed, Eurocentric Iranian bourgeoisie, who grotesquely identify with Europe, dye their hair blond, provincial Iranians.http://books.google.com/books?&id=2pHtAAAAMAAJ&dq=lorshttp://books.google.com/books?&id=2pHtAAAAMAAJ&dq=denigrate
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Page 139
The sharp contrast in my parents’ skin colors alerted me to an astounding prevalence of Iranian racism very early in my life.2 My father’s nickname was ” Dadi Siah,” or “Dadi the Black” — his name being Khodadad, Dadi for short.http://books.google.com/books?&id=2pHtAAAAMAAJ&dq=dadi

A Review of the imposed war by the Iraqi regime upon the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Legal Department – 1983 – 194 pages – Page xvii
Airing several radio broadcasts in the Persian, Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish, Turkman and Baluchi languages in order … During celebrations marking the twelfth anniversary of coming to power of the Ba ‘athist Party in lraq, placards bearing slogans such as “leave the Arabs of Ahwaz alone”, “the Arab Gulf is the graveyard of the racist Persian regime” were…http://books.google.com/books?id=JiPRAAAAMAAJ&q=baluchihttp://books.google.com/books?id=JiPRAAAAMAAJ&q=racist

Near East/South Asia report: Issue 84156
United States. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, United States. Joint Publications Research Service – Page 34
Political organizations in Ahvaz were hoping for another regime to succeed the Shah’s anti-Arab, racist regime which was … At first, the national movement in Ahvaz supported the present regime in Iran and gave it its blessings.�http://books.google.com/books?&id=eTG6AAAAIAAJ&dq=racist

Human rights, the UN and the Bahá’ís in Iran – Page 401
Nazila Ghanea-Hercock – 2002 – 628 pages – Preview
He said that the Committee had tried to establish whether Iran’s internal laws were in conformity with the Convention but that ‘the latest report offered no solution to that question’. The only information forthcoming from the … submitted together in document CERD/C/226/Add.8 dated 11 February 1993.41 This was again a very dry legislative document, referring to various constitutional and other legal provisions against racism in Iran with absolutely no light�http://books.google.com/books?id=GeHNoviEXw0C&pg=PA401

Iran after the revolution: crisis of an Islamic state – Page 231
Saeed Rahnema, Sohrab Behdad – 1996 – 256 pages
Turkish and Arab domination over Iran in the remote past was declared the main historical obstacle to the continuity of the glorious Persian empire. This racist ideology denied the national, linguistic and cultural diversity of Iran.http://books.google.com/books?id=VlyCpbY9_QQC&pg=PA231

Azerbaijan Since Independence – Page 460
Svante E. Cornell – M.E. Sharpe, 2010 – 512 pages
After the summer 2003 demonstrations, the Iranian government cracked down on student as well as nationalist organizations. A 19-year-old Azeri girl was executed by Iranian authorities in July 2003 for her role in the protests (―Ethnic Azeri Student Leader Killed in Iran—Paper, BBC Monitoring International Reports, July 22, 2002). In an earlier incident, in January 2000, Iranian forces had opened fire on a demonstration in Tabriz (―Azeri TV Says Iranian Police Opened Fire During Rally in Tabriz, BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, January 10, 2000).http://books.google.com/books?id=whVDskeHl2YC&pg=PA460

Netherlands Institute of Human Rights – CERD Concluding Observations: IRAN ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF – 20 Feb 2011 … The Committee recommends that the State party undertake the necessary measures to harmonize its domestic legislation with the Convention. It also recommends that the State party take further steps for public dissemination of the provisions of the Convention and the possibilities for its invocation to combat racial discrimination, including in minority languages, and that it provide its Government officials with education and training in this area.

8. The Committee notes the information furnished by the State party on the definition of racial discrimination in article 19 of the Iranian Constitution and reiterates its concern that this definition does not explicitly cover the forms of racial and ethnic discrimination prohibited under the Convention. (art. 1)

The Committee again urges the State party to consider reviewing the definition of racial discrimination contained in its Constitution and domestic law in order to bring it into full conformity with article 1, paragraph 1, of the Convention.

9. While commending the efforts undertaken by the State party to empower women, the Committee is concerned that women of minority origin may be at risk of facing double discrimination. (art. 2)
The Committee draws the State party’s attention to its general recommendation No. 25 (2000) on gender-related dimensions of racial discrimination and recommends that the State party continue its efforts to empower women and promote their rights, paying particular attention to women belonging to minorities.

10. The Committee notes the information furnished by the State party on the 1985 Press Act. The Committee also notes the efforts undertaken by the State party to combat racist discourse in the media by applying sanctions to newspapers whose publications have included racist discourse. However, the Committee is concerned at continued reports of racial discrimination, inter alia, directed against Azeri communities in the media, including stereotyped and demeaning portrayals of those peoples and communities. The Committee is also concerned at the reports of racial discrimination in everyday life and statements of racial discrimination and incitement to hatred by government officials. (art. 4)

The Committee recommends that the State party take appropriate steps to combat manifestations in the media, as well as in everyday life, of racial prejudice that could lead to racial discrimination. The Committee also recommends that, in the area of information, the State party promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among the various racial and ethnic groups in the State party, especially on the part of public officials, and including through the adoption of a media code of ethics that would commit the media to showing respect for the identity and culture of all communities in the State party, taking into account the possible intersection of racial and religious discrimination. It reiterates its previous request that the State party submit information in its next periodic report on the application of this law to combat racial discrimination…http://sim.law.uu.nl/SIM/CaseLaw/uncom.nsf/804bb175b68baaf7c125667f004cb333/4af24cf864d4b316c125778f0032b7a2?OpenDocument

Today.Az – All news from Azerbaijan – 16 Nov 2006 … […]
Balochis have been preyed upon by the Iranian regime. On 23 August 2006, the Marsad Group attacked a village near Zahidan, the provincial capital of Balochistan, and killed two young men in front of women and children. They were forced out of their homes, to search for the members of resistance movement and weapons. The two young men had protested against the ill treatment of the women. On the 24th of August Amir Hamzeh Eidouzehi, a young man, was hanged in public in Baloch town of Khash, and another young men, Ali Jan Moradi, was hanged in IranShahr on 27 August 2006, both were accused of instigating public trouble and drug trafficking, a sentenced without trail. On the 24th of September three men identified as Ali Karimi, Gholam Koohkan, and Khodamorad Lashkarzadeh, were hanged in prison in provincial capital Zahedan. These dissidents were also executed on charges of drug smuggling and convicted without trial.

Azeri Turks, comprising around a third of the Iranian population and also subject to racism in Iran, have also backed the campaign to halt the execution of Ahwazis. The Azerbaijani Youth Association is lobbying the European Parliament and European governments to take action. A representative wrote to the British Ahwazi Friendship Society (BAFS), saying: “It is with great concern that I have heard about Ahwazis in Iran facing execution. When it comes to life we make no difference on if they are Arabs or Turks. We must show solidarity with each other and together fight against these fascists.”http://www.today.az/print/news/politics/32679.html

Iran: Azeri Turks protest against discrimination Workers’ Liberty – I will fight for the independendence of my Azeri brothers in Iran and their succession from the persion chavinism and racism.http://www.workersliberty.org/node/6325

The League’s member state allowed al-Bashir to travel around their countries without being apprehended! Hypocrisy and racist double standards are the force …

It seems that the opportunist authoritarian racist National Congress Party (NCP) regime in Khartoum found joy and delight in the events in Libya favourable to grab political revenge against its archenemy the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) through statements issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that it does not exclude the participation of the Darfur rebels in the suppression of the popular mass demonstrations that taking place in all parts of Libya. The purpose behind this evil assertion was to incite sedition to create a rift between the people of Libya and the Just cause of the people of Sudan in Darfur.